One of the most creative responses to my question, "What color goes with each emotion?" came in the form of a poem by an artist cousin of mine:
Anger is a dark red throbbing, its edges glowing orange-yellow, and this in a dark place.
Fear is a very dark gray with a greenish cast.
Sad is less a color than the blur of whatever colors we see through tear-filled eyes.
Shame is the color of the top of whatever shoes I'm wearing.
Surprise is an unexpected flash of brightness, the hue of which doesn't matter.
Disgust has no particular color; it's a recoil from corruption.
Happy is not one color but the sparkling of many.
Love is all the colors we have of eyes, and skin, and hair.
While thinking about color, I learned that in 1666 Sir Isaac Newton became the first person to use a prism to separate pure white light into the colors on the visible spectrum--the colors of the rainbow. Each color has a unique wavelength that makes it irreducible, unable to be separated into other colors. White is the combination of all the visible colors.
RadioLab recently did a terrific show on color. It covers Newton's color experiments and the sequential emergence of individual colors in evolving languages.
