Color modulates disgust on surfaces, but not fear in scenes

Negative emotions such as disgust and fear play an important role in helping humans rapidly avoid threats and dangers in the natural environment. Although these emotions are influenced by context and situation, they can also be directly evoked by simple image features encoded in the early visual system. The present study examined how chromatic information in visual stimuli contributes to the perception of two negative emotions: disgust and fear. Participants rated the degree of disgust and fear elicited by 100 chromatic images and their achromatic counterparts. Results showed that the removal of chromatic information significantly reduced perceived disgust, while having little effect on perceived fear. Furthermore, an analysis of the relationship between image category and negative emotion indicated that distant “scenes” (e.g., landscapes), which tend to depict wide and distant spaces, were more likely to elicit fear, whereas proximal “surfaces” (e.g., close-up views of textures or objects) were more likely to elicit disgust. These findings suggest that chromatic information plays a particularly important role in the perception of disgust, especially for surface-related stimuli, whereas fear appears to rely less on chromatic cues.