Development of the Red-Negative Association: Motivation-based behaviors

- Color can influence how people perceive an event, in an aversive versus appetitive emotional-motivational system.
- We propose a study that investigated color-emotion associations in context - for the first time - comparing children in the first and last years of primary education.
- The color red implied avoidance for an ostensibly evaluative activity, but not for a recreational one, and this only in the fifth graders.

The color red has been seen to correspond to different emotion-based motivational behaviors in adults, depending on the context (i.e., achievement vs. romance). Given that red‐meaning associations may result - at least in part - from background experience, we tested this effect in 51 children. First (Mage = 6.42, SD = 0.60) and fifth (Mage = 10.71, SD = 0.43) graders were asked to choose between sheets of paper with red or green borders to carry out two kinds of activities (i.e., evaluative vs. recreational). Analysis of the results showed that the older children tended to avoid the red-bordered paper for the evaluative tasks, whereas the younger children chose red for both kinds of activities. These findings suggest that context-driven red‐meaning associations develop across grades.