ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1593928
Text-to-image models reveal specific color-emotion associations
Provisionally accepted
- Pontifical Javeriana University, Bogotá, Colombia
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Text-to-image models learn associations between human-provided image tags and image features over billions of examples. As a result, such models provide a powerful mean to study the psychological relationships between colors and emotions. We generated images for different emotions descriptions varying in valence, arousal and dominance across several subjects and then extracted color features (chroma and L*a*b* values) from the resultant images to find color-emotion associations. Results show a joint effect of red and chroma to generate effects of joy, rage and negative powerless. In addition, lightness is key in generating effects of serenity, threat and a relief/stress divergence. Dominance emerged as an important dimension to understand interactions and nuances in color-emotion associations. The study highlights that specific combination of color elements convey emotions, rather than and beyond simple associations such as red-anger or lightness-valence.
Keywords: Color, emotion, diffusion models, Text-to-image, sensory associations
Received: 17 Mar 2025; Accepted: 12 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Alvarado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jorge Alvarado, Pontifical Javeriana University, Bogotá, Colombia
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