Red Facilitates Anger Perception Across Cultures

Color is not only a perceptual attribute but also a socially embedded signal carrying psychological meaning. Previous research has shown that people tend to associate specific colors with particular emotions, with red being especially complex. On the one hand, red is commonly linked to anger. On the other hand, red can also be associated with positive emotions such as joy and celebration, particularly in Chinese culture. The present study aimed to examine whether, within this bivalent cultural context, red activates both associations simultaneously (coexistence hypothesis) or engages one over the other (competition hypothesis) across three experiments. Experiment 1 examined both Eastern/Chinese and Western/Canadian participants in a facial emotion identification task, in which they were asked to rapidly identify angry and happy emotions presented against red, green, or gray background. We found that a red background significantly facilitated the identification of angry emotions while, in most cases, impairing or having no effect on the identification of happy emotions in both groups of participants. These findings support the competition hypothesis rather than the coexistence hypothesis. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern in a new Chinese sample under reduced perceptual salience of the display. Experiment 3 further examined the extent to which stimulus factors, such as background size (full-screen vs. local), modulate these effects. We consistently found that red-anger association predominated across three experiments, which was not moderated by racial profile of the emotional faces, participants’ cultural background, or sensory-level factors. These consistent findings highlight that the robustness of red–anger association in visual-emotion processing.