A Tool for Measuring Relative Effects of Hue, Brightness and Saturation on Color Pleasantness

A technique for evaluating the relative effects of hue, brightness and saturation on color pleasantness is explored. 24 colors, specified by their Munsell notation, are dichotomized in pleasant and unpleasant ones by 36 female and 42 male subjects. A discriminant analysis indicates a major effect of saturation, which determines 88.36% of the variation judgments of pleasantness. Brightness is less important (11.56%) and hue is almost irrelevant (0.68%). The question had never been investigated before, perhaps because the Munsell notation for hue is not metric. We overcame this difficulty by transforming the hue notations into metric scores using Indow and Uchizono's (1960) multidimensional mapping of Munsell colors. It has to be emphasized that this paper describes a tool for measuring the relative contributions of hue, brightness, and saturation to the attribute of color pleasantness, but that the findings of this investigation may not generalize to a set of colors different from the ones used currently.