The colour yellow, as you might expect, is often associated with happiness. Colour specialist Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director at the Pantone Color Institute, has been conducting colour word association studies for 30 years. Her research shows that words like ‘sunshine', ‘warmth' and ‘happiness’ are common responses from people who have been shown a swatch of yellow. Additional data from an ongoing international survey on colour and emotion is proving that the association between yellow and happiness can be greatly influenced by an unlikely factor – where you live. A survey of 6625 people from 65 countries shows that the farther you live from the equator the more likely you appreciate bright colours. Only 5.7% of people in Egypt linked yellow with joy, whereas 87.7% of people living in Finland did. In the USA, upwards of 70% of the people tested agreed with the yellow-joy association.
According to the 2015 World Happiness Report the ten happiest countries in the world are Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia – all of which are a long way from the equator. Maybe that old expression is right after all – “Too much of something can be a bad thing.”