- The Guardian,
- Tuesday June 24 2008
The year 1931 stands out in the history of research about mentally ill people's favourite colours. That summer, Siegfried E Katz of the New York state psychiatric institute and hospital published a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology called Colour Preference in the Insane.
Assisted by a Dr Cheney, Katz tested 134 hospitalised patients with mental health problems. For simplicity's sake, he limited the testing to six colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. No black. No white. No shades of grey.
"These colours," he wrote, "rectangular in shape, one and one-half inches square, cut from Bradley coloured papers were pasted in two rows on a grey cardboard. They were three inches apart. The colours were numbered haphazardly and the number of each colour placed above it. The cardboard was presented to the patient and he was asked to place his finger on the number of the colour he liked best. After he had made the choice he was asked in a similar manner for the next best colour, and so on."
Some of the patients "cooperated well", and made six choices. Others, Katz reported, "quickly lost interest and made only one, two or three".
Blue was the most popular colour. Men, in the aggregate, then favoured green, but women patients were divided on green, red or violet as a second choice.
Patients who had resided in the hospital for three or more years were slightly less emphatic about blue. Katz says these long-term guests were "those with most marked mental deterioration". Their preference, as a group, shifted towards green and yellow.
Those of longest tenure, though few in number, had a slightly elevated liking for orange.
The report is packed with titbits that beg, even now, for further analysis:
· 38% of schizophrenics and manic depressives, each, gave first preference to blue, and 42% of all other patients
· Green received the first choice from 16% of schizophrenics, 9% of manic depressives, and 13% of other diseases
· For red as first choice, the percentage of votes were: manic depressives, 16; other diseases, 15; schizophrenics, 12. As second choice, they were: manic depressives, 22; schizophrenics, 18; other diseases, 13
· Orange and yellow were also best liked by manic depressives; green by schizophrenics; and violet by all others.
Katz foresaw practical applications for his research. He suggested that "in the furnishings of living quarters the selection of colours pleasing to special groups of patients might be worth consideration".
Consciously or not, hospital staff seem to have followed Katz's insights in fashioning their personal at-work appearance. The evocatively named Bragard Medical Uniforms, a New York firm founded in 1933, now publishes a list of the most popular uniform colours. The list currently is topped by, in order: royal blue; dark grey (which, alas, Katz excluded from his 1931 survey); dark green; and red.
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
