Colour and emotion: the use of the colours of Lüscher test in the artistic field

The Lüscher colour test was created by the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher in 1949 and consists of several coloured patches that can be used to assess the patient's psychological state and profile. The main advantage of this test is its high usability and trustability. After a preliminary analysis of using Lüscher colours, we set up a first perceptive test asking 20 subjects to associate adjectives with Lüscher's colours freely. This first test aims at defining if the basic colour terms defined by Lüscher and used to create psychological assessments are coherent and consistent in a free termassociation test. After this first perceptive test, we integrated Lüscher's basic colours with the ones used by Kandinskij, an artist who Lüscher's colour theories have strongly influenced. In this second test, we considered both Lüscher and Kandinskij basic colours. We asked 49 people to associate the colours with specific terms derived from the Lüscher theory, Kandinskij system and the first test. From the analysis of these two experiments, it has been possible to demonstrate a strong coherence of specific colour-terms associations, which are consistent with the introduction of controlled colour shifts, while other colour-terms associations present a higher variability.