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Last week we talked about people trying to capture pure primary experience of a person. We defined a primary experience that is "felt" unconsciously and as a feeling that occurs before one tries to identify it with something or analyze it. The i-function is what anaylzes what you are feeling, and once the i-function is activated and we try to anaylze the ifunction, it is no longer a primary experience. There are many artists who try to capture such feelings or intuitions through art, such as the Mark Rothko painting we were shown last week. I was interested in this subject and I began looking at colors and the psychology behind them. There are specific colors associated with different emotions and feelings. The most common ones are red, yellow, and blue. Red which has been found to stimulate the adrenal glands and therefore associated with anger and hunger; yellow which has been found to stimulate the brain and activate the lymph system and therefore associated with clear thinking and expediency; and blue which has been found to lower blood pressure and therefore associated with relaxation and calm. These colors and feeling associations are rather common knowledge and used in art, marketing, and of course on our walls. A interesting thought i stumbled upon is that the Mcdonalds color scheme was made so because red color stimulates hunger while yellow causes a expedient tendency, therefore you would be hungry, buy your food, and then feel rushed from and leave. Voila! Fast food :) From this color psychology I began to think about colors and genders. Is there a gender difference in response to color?

Looking this up I found that, although findings are ambiguous, many investigations have indicated that there are differences between gender in preferences for colors. Early investigations done by by Guilford (1934) on the harmony of color combinations found that a person is likely to see balance in colors that are closely related or the opposite. Guilford also found some evidence that more pleasing results were obtained from either very small or very large differences in hue rather than medium differences, with this tendency more frequent in women than men.

A review of color studies done by Eysenck in early 1940's notes the following results to the relationship between gender and color. He found yellow had a higher affective value for the men than women and another researcher, St. George, maintained that blue for men stands out far more than for women. An even earlier study by Jastrow found men preferred blue to red and women red to blue (reference at bottom).

These are interesting development and it makes me wonder, how do the i-functions of women differ from men? Are these color preferences actually only due to social and cultural trends that are deemed appropriate (baby boy=blue, baby girl=pink) or are there actually differences in our brains that cause us to like certain colors better? Are our primary experiences divided by gender?