Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 1

Anger is red, sadness is blue: Emotion depictions in abstract

visual art by artists and non-artists
Department of Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven,
Claudia Damiano Leuven, Belgium

Department of Design, Kala Bhavana,

Pinaki Gayen Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan, India

Department of Psychology, University of Toronto,

Morteza Rezanejad Toronto, ON, Canada

Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness,

Archi Banerjee Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Gobinda Banik Department of English, Basirhat College, Basirhat, India

Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness,

Priyadarshi Patnaik Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Department of Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven,

Johan Wagemans Leuven, Belgium

Department of Psychology, University of Toronto,

Dirk B. Walther Toronto, ON, Canada

Through the manipulation of color and form, visual
abstract art is often used to convey feelings and
emotions. Here, we explored how colors and lines are
used to express basic emotions and whether non-artists
express emotions through art in similar ways as trained
artists. Both artists and non-artists created abstract
color drawings and line drawings depicting six emotions
(i.e., anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and wonder). To
test whether people represented basic emotions in
similar ways, we computationally predicted the emotion
of a given drawing by comparing it to a set of references
created by averaging across all other participants’
drawings within each emotion category. We found that
prediction accuracy was higher for color drawings than
line drawings and higher for color drawings by
non-artists than by artists. In a behavioral experiment,
we found that people (N = 242) could also accurately
infer emotions, showing the same pattern of results as
our computational predictions. Further computational
analyses of the drawings revealed systematic use of
certain colors and line features to depict each basic
emotion (e.g., anger is generally redder and more
densely drawn than other emotions, sadness is more
blue and contains more vertical lines). Taken together,
these results imply that abstract color and line drawings
are able to convey certain emotions based on their
visual features, which are also used by human observers
to understand the intended emotional connotation of
abstract artworks.
Introduction
People have been telling stories through art for
thousands of years. In fact, some of the earliest cave
paintings of animals, dating back over 45,000 years
(Aubert et al., 2014; Aubert et al., 2018; Brumm et al.,
2021), are thought to depict hunting scene narratives
and creatures that existed, or perhaps did not, in
the world of the early human (Valladas et al., 2001).

Citation: Damiano, C., Gayen, P., Rezanejad, M., Banerjee, A., Banik, G., Patnaik, P., Wagemans, J., & Walther, D. B. (2023). Anger
is red, sadness is blue: Emotion depictions in abstract visual art by artists and non-artists. Journal of Vision, 23(4):1, 1–16,
https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.4.1.
https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.4.1 Received October 25, 2022; published April 3, 2023 ISSN 1534-7362 Copyright 2023 The Authors

This work is
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03/23/2024
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
Through the manipulation of, for example, color,
texture, and form, art communicates desired
information and is used to capture our rituals and
experiences of daily life. Among those experiences are
events that trigger emotions such as anger, fear, and
happiness. Here, we explore the visual features that allow
us to convey specific emotions and whether training in
the arts plays a role in one’s ability to depict emotions
through art.
Several traditional theories of emotion state that
emotions are brought about by physical processes
of an animal’s brain or body and can be explained
by reactions to events in the physical world (Barrett,
Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007). For example,
appraisal theories suggest that emotions are adaptive
responses to appraisals of the features of an organism’s
environment and that these responses are necessary for
the organism’s well-being (Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer,
& Frijda, 2013). Similarly, the basic emotion theory
generally defines emotions as patterns of behavior
related to certain subjective experiences (Keltner, Sauter,
Tracy, & Cowen, 2019). As such, emotion judgments
are an integral part of daily life and reflect the most
basic and fundamental aspects of human behavior
(Ledoux, 1998). Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen (1969)
suggested that there are six basic emotion categories
that are universal in their production and recognition:
anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. In the
current study, we examined how people create abstract
drawings representing each of these emotions; however,
we opted to replace “surprise” with “wonder” for
two reasons. First, although anger, disgust, fear, and
sadness are clearly negative emotions and joy is clearly a
positive emotion, surprise does not have a clear positive
or negative valence (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, &
Ellsworth, 2007). Thus, we chose to include an emotion
that was more obviously positive to balance out the
several negative emotions in the set. Second, wonder
is an underrepresented and understudied emotion
within the field, despite its observed relationship to art
appreciation and aesthetic pleasure (Fingerhut & Prinz,
2018).
No matter the exact emotion in question, emotional
appraisals are often triggered quickly and automatically
(Barrett et al., 2007; Moors et al., 2013). Past research
suggests that there are common visual features that
people use as cues to infer certain emotions or to
make certain affective evaluations. For example,
previous work has found that angularity is associated
with negative valence and threat (Bar & Neta,
2006; Damiano, Walther, & Cunningham, 2021a;
Larson, Aronoff, & Stearns, 2007), symmetry or
repeating patterns are associated with positive aesthetic
judgments (Damiano, Wilder, Zhou, Walther, &
Wagemans, 2021b; Pecchinenda, Bertamini, Makin,
& Ruta, 2014), and certain colors, such as red and
yellow, are often linked with certain emotions, such
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2
as anger and joy, respectively (Jonauskaite, Parraga,
Quiblier, & Mohr, 2020). It is thus unsurprising that
we even have sayings in English that use color to
represent emotions (e.g., “seeing red” to mean “being
angry,” “feeling blue” to mean “feeling sad”). Artists
and designers take advantage of these associations and
manipulate color or shape to achieve a certain reaction
from the viewer or user. For example, in Disney’s
film Inside Out, specific visual features are matched
to the personalities of different emotion characters
(e.g., the Anger character is the color red, with spiky
fire-like hair). This depiction seems to make intuitive
sense to the viewer, and even children can immediately
understand the intended emotion of artworks simply
from visual features such as color (Pouliou, Bonoti,
& Nikonanou, 2018).
Thus, there is ample evidence that clear associations
between certain visual features and emotions exist, but
the exact nature of these associations could be explored
further. For example, although certain contour features
such as smooth long lines or short angular lines are
typically associated with a general positive or negative
valence, respectively (Damiano et al., 2021a), their
relation to more specific emotions such as disgust, fear,
and sadness is not as well known. In the current study,
we asked whether there is a recognizable distinction in
line usage between multiple negative emotions, such
as anger and disgust or fear and sadness. A previous
study that did use more specific emotion labels found
that people indeed were successfully able to predict
basic emotion labels from small abstract line drawings
made by artists (Stamatopoulou & Cupchik, 2017).
This result suggests that there are indeed noticeable
differences in line drawing representations among
several emotions, allowing viewers to be able to
successfully tell them apart; yet, the specific features
associated with each emotion that allowed people
to make these predictions were neither explored nor
discussed.
In contrast to contour features, the relationship
of color to basic emotion categories is much better
studied (Jonauskaite et al., 2020; Mohr, Jonauskaite,
Dan-Glauser, Uusküla, & Dael, 2018). We hypothesized
that we would replicate previous findings in the
current study, with colors such as red being more
often associated with anger, blue with sadness, yellow
with joy, etc. What is yet to be explored, however,
is whether colors are better than contour features
at conveying differences across emotions. On the
one hand, the well-established associations between
certain colors and emotions potentially mean that
color is a stronger carrier of emotion information than
contour features. On the other hand, accurate visual
perception of objects and scenes can be achieved rapidly
from viewing simple line drawings (Walther, Chai,
Caddigan, Beck, & Fei-Fei, 2011) completely devoid
of texture or color information. Additionally, the
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
suggested evolutionary link between contour features
and emotional appraisals (e.g., angular contours are
rated as threatening because they may cue dangerous
stimuli such as thorns or fangs) (Bar & Neta, 2006;
Friedenberg, Lauria, Hennig, & Gardner, 2022) could
mean that contour–emotion associations are even more
fundamental than color–emotion associations. In the
current study, we explored whether emotions are more
easily inferred from color drawings or line drawings by
attempting to predict emotions from these drawings
and comparing prediction accuracies across image
types.
Another question we explored in parallel in this study
is whether artists are better than non-artists at depicting
emotions, such that other viewers can accurately infer
which emotion is being depicted. Besides skill-level
differences in artistic tasks such as drawing, visual
artists tend to be better than non-artists at switching
between local and global processing (Chamberlain
& Wagemans, 2015). Research has also shown slight
relationships between drawing ability and other
visual–spatial tasks, such as the Embedded Figures
Test and Mental Rotation Task (Chamberlain et al.,
2019), as well as superior performance on imagery tasks
(Calabrese & Marucci, 2006). This means that not only
are artists better at drawing than non-artists but they
also seemingly outperform non-artists on imagining and
producing what something should look like. Therefore, a
reasonable hypothesis is that artists will more skillfully
depict emotion concepts using lines and colors,
and thus emotions will be more easily understood
from artists’ drawings compared with non-artists’
drawings. However, as artists gain more experience and
training, they likely become more distinctive in their
individual artistic styles. This could lead to atypical
feature usage that would make the interpretation of
the depicted emotions more difficult. Thus, we will
compare the accuracy with which emotions can be
deciphered from artists’ drawings versus non-artists’
drawings.
To summarize our goals and approach, in the current
study we used computational analysis methods to
determine how people depict and interpret emotions
through abstract artworks. More specifically, we
explored the degree to which people convey emotions
through art in similar ways and which specific
visual features are associated with each emotion. In
an additional behavioral study, we asked whether
non-artists can successfully infer emotions from
abstract artworks and what type of information
they use to be able to do so. We also compared
drawings made by artists and non-artists to determine
whether artistic training changes the ways in which
emotions are depicted through abstract art and whether
those differences, if they exist, make it easier or
more difficult for viewers to understand the desired
emotion.
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3
Methods
Stimulus collection
Participants
A group of 46 artists and another group of 45
non-artists provided the stimuli for this study. The
artists (mean age, 23.8 years; 19 men, 26 women) were
recruited from the Ontario College of Art and Design
(OCAD) University. When analyzing the data, we
realized that six people from the artist group did not
fit our criteria for inclusion (i.e., having formal art
training and currently in an art-related program, such
as drawing and illustration, at OCAD University); thus,
we excluded them from the sample. The remaining
participants in the artist group were art students
attending OCAD University in the Drawing and
Painting or Illustration programs, and most were in
their third year of study in a 4-year program (first year,
three people; second year, eight people; third year, 18
people; fourth year or above, 11 people).
The other group consisted of 45 non-artists (mean
age, 23.6 years; 14 men, 31 women) recruited from the
University of Toronto. We excluded four non-artists
because they had formal art training or were currently
in an art-related program at the University of Toronto.
The remaining non-artists were students in STEM
programs (e.g., science, technology, engineering, math),
and most were in their fourth year of study in a 4-year
program (first year, two people; second year, two
people; third year, eight people; fourth year or above,
29 people).
All participants across both groups were each paid
$10 Canadian for their participation. The experiment
was approved by the ethics boards at the University of
Toronto and OCAD University.
Materials
All participants were given two white letter-sized
sheets of paper to make line drawings and color
drawings in designated boxes. There were six boxes per
sheet and each box was labeled with an emotion (anger,
disgust, fear, joy, sadness, or wonder) and drawing type
(color drawing or line drawing) that should be drawn
in that box. Below each emotion label, participants
were also asked to briefly specify their reasons for using
certain lines or colors in their drawings. The written
responses are not analyzed here.
Participants were given pencils (2B, 4B, and 6B)
to create the line drawings and a pastel color set to
create the color drawings. The pastel sets were Pentel
Oil Pastel sets consisting of 16 colors, listed here using
the conventional name, the closest Munsell color chip
notation, and the corresponding approximate red,
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
green, and blue (RGB) values: red (5R 5/18; [255, 0, 0]),
orange (2.5YR 6/14; [255, 140, 0]), dark yellow (2.5Y
8/12; [255, 200, 0]), yellow (7.5Y 9/12; [255, 255, 0]),
light green (7.5GY 9/14; [150, 255, 0]), green (2.5G
6/10; [0, 200, 65]), cyan/light blue (7.5B 9/8; [80, 230,
255]), blue (5PB 6/14; [0, 155, 255]), dark blue (7.5PB
5/20; [50, 125, 255]), pink (2.5RP 9/6; [255, 200, 230]),
beige (5Y 9/2; [250, 240, 200]), light brown (2.5YR 5/15;
[200, 70, 0]), dark brown (7.5YR 3/6; [100, 60, 10]), gray
(5GY 9/1; [228, 228, 228]), black (5N 1/0; [0, 0, 0]),
and white (5N 10/0; [255, 255, 255]). Note that we did
not use a chromameter to measure the pastel colors;
therefore, both the Munsell color chips and RGB values
are the closest approximations of the colors used by
participants.
Procedure
The artists’ drawings were collected in the outdoor
courtyard of OCAD University. Participants were
approached individually and were seated in a location
where they felt comfortable drawing. Several artists
may have been drawing at the same time, but they
were seated separately from each other, with sufficient
distance that they could neither see nor be influenced
by each other’s drawings. The non-artists’ drawings
were collected in a classroom setting at the University
of Toronto. Again, several participants may have been
drawing at the same time, but they were seated at
individual tables separately from one another and could
not see each other’s drawings.
In both cases, participants were asked to sit
comfortably, and all necessary art material and paper
were provided to them. The experimenters gave the
following instructions, which were also written on
sheets of paper given to participants: “Please make
one line drawing and one color drawing separately
for each of the six emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy,
sadness, and wonder). You can remember previous
experiences associated with these emotions, but please
depict all emotions only through non-representational
or abstract visual components. Do not use figurative
art, meaningful shapes, or text in your artworks.
You may use multiple lines and colors in your
artworks. There is no set time limit, but it should
not take longer than 30 minutes to complete the
drawings.”
Each participant provided one line drawing and one
color drawing for each of the six emotions, providing 12
artworks in total. Overall, 552 abstract drawings of six
emotions (276 line drawings + 276 color drawings) were
collected from the 46 artists, and 540 abstract drawings
were collected from the 45 non-artists, for a total of
1092 drawings. These drawings were then scanned
(300 dpi) to be used digitally for computational image
analyses and in an online behavioral experiment with
a new set of participants. Due to the exclusion of six
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participants from the artist group and four participants
from the non-artist group, subsequent analyses of the
drawings were conducted on a subset of the stimuli
(972 total: 480 artists’ drawings and 492 non-artists’
drawings). See Figure 1 for sample artworks from an
artist and non-artist. The full set of drawings is available
on the OSF page for this study (https://osf.io/b6xuq/).
Computational emotion predictions
In order to determine if both artists and non-artists
depict emotions in predictable ways, we ran a
computational emotion prediction analysis. If we can
successfully predict the depicted emotion from drawings
at an above-chance level, that tells us that people’s
drawings tend to be similar within a certain emotion
and different across emotions.
The emotion predictions were made using a
leave-one-subject-out, cross-validation procedure. In
order to predict the emotion category from all drawings
of each participant, we compared each drawing, one
at a time, to an average reference drawing made by
averaging all drawings by all other participants within
one emotion category (see Figure 1B for an example of
the reference drawings). Therefore, each drawing was
compared to six reference drawings (one per emotion)
by correlating the drawing in a pixel-wise manner to
each reference drawing. The label of the reference that
gave the highest correlation became the prediction
for that drawing. If the prediction matched the true
emotion label, then that was counted as an accurate
guess; otherwise, it was inaccurate. The total accuracy
for each participant was the proportion of correctly
predicted emotions (chance = 1/6 because there were six
emotions). We performed this procedure four times and
then compared the prediction results using a two-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA), with art experience
(artists, non-artists) and drawing type (color drawing,
line drawing) as factors.
An additional prediction procedure was performed
on the line drawings only using the distributions of
length, orientation, and curvature features as predictor
variables (see Visual feature analysis section below for
details on how the features were computed for each
line drawing, and see Figure 6 for average feature
histograms per emotion). In this version, we once
again predicted the emotion on an image-by-image
basis using a leave-one-subject-out, cross-validation
procedure. However, instead of correlating the entire
image to a set of reference maps, we compared the
histograms of contour features on each drawing to a set
of reference feature histograms (i.e., the average feature
histograms of all non-left-out images, per emotion)
using chi-square distance. This time, the prediction
was the label of the reference histogram that gave
the smallest chi-square distance. Once again, if the
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al. 5

Figure 1. (A) Sample color and line drawings for each emotion, made by one artist (#2) and one non-artist (#1). (B) One example of a
set of color reference drawings used in the computational emotion prediction procedure with color drawings (top) and line drawings
(bottom).

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 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
prediction matched the true emotion label, then that
was counted as an accurate prediction; otherwise, it
was inaccurate. The total accuracy for each participant
was the proportion of correctly predicted emotions
(chance = 1/6).
Emotion predictions by humans
Participants
A total of 244 first-year psychology students at
KU Leuven (Belgium) participated in this experiment
(39 men and 205 women; mean age of 19 years). All
participants could speak English and received one
experimental credit for participation, which counted
toward extra credit in their first-year psychology
course. The experiment was approved by the Social and
Societal Ethics Committee at KU Leuven. To check
that participants were paying sufficient attention to the
task, we calculated the variance of responses within
a five-trial-long sliding window, as well as the mean
reaction time across all trials, for each participant.
Participants failed the attention check if their mean
variance was less than 0.2 or if their mean response time
was less than 500 ms. Two participants were excluded
for failing our criteria. Thus, the data of a total of 242
participants were included in further analyses.
Stimuli
All drawings collected from the artists and non-artists
were used as stimuli in the behavioral experiment.
Each participant viewed 312 drawings in total (156 line
drawings and 156 color drawings) chosen randomly
from the set of 1092 drawings, with the requirement
that there be an equal number of drawings in each
condition—that is, 13 drawings of each combination
of art training (artists vs. non-artists) × drawing type
(line drawing vs. color drawing) × emotion (anger,
disgust, fear, joy, sadness, or wonder). Each drawing
was displayed at a resolution of 700 × 550 pixels. Recall
that 120 images were removed from the analyses; thus,
trials containing any of those images were not analyzed
(an average of 2.58 trials per participant were removed).
Procedure
As the behavioral experiment took place online,
participants used their own computers to participate.
Participants received a link to participate through
KU Leuven’s participant pool. Participants provided
informed consent by clicking on “I agree” after
reading the consent form online. Upon a participant’s
agreeing to participate, the experiment began with
instructions stating that participants would see abstract
drawings, one at a time, depicting one of six emotions
(anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, or wonder) and that
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6
participants simply had to indicate which of the six
emotions was being depicted in each drawing. Each
trial consisted of a black fixation cross in the center of
the screen shown for 500 ms, followed by a drawing
displayed in the center of the screen against a gray
background (RGB color [128, 128, 128]). The button
options for each of the six emotions were displayed
horizontally below the drawing in alphabetical order,
along with the prompt, “What emotion is being
depicted?” The images were displayed on screen until
the participant made a response. The response (i.e.,
the chosen emotion) and reaction time were recorded
on each trial. The experiment was programmed using
jsPsych (de Leeuw, 2015), and consisted of two separate
blocks with a short break given in between blocks
for participants to rest. Approximately half of the
participants saw the set of 156 color drawings first
(N = 119), and the other half (N = 125) viewed the
line drawings first. The experiment took an average of
22 minutes to complete.
Visual feature analysis
To quantify any differences in color and line
usage across categories and artistic expertise, we
computationally extracted several features from the
drawings, such as the number of colors and lines and
the percentage of pixels used. The following sections
detail the types of features that were extracted and how
this was done.
Color drawings
In order to analyze the color drawings, we first
needed to label and quantify the colors that were used in
each drawing. To do this, we compared the RGB value
of each pixel to a large online table of RGB values (see
https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.
html#color-table). To obtain meaningful labels for our
drawings, we collapsed many of the color labels from
the online table into its closest label that was present in
our color set; for example, crimson, red, and brick red
would all receive the label “red” (see the final table on
our OSF page for this study, https://osf.io/b6xuq/). The
labels we used, based on the colors that were provided
to the artists and non-artists, were red, orange, dark
yellow, yellow, light green, green, cyan, blue, dark blue,
pink, beige, light brown, dark brown, gray, black, and
white (see Stimulus collection section above). Violet
(10PB 3/10; [80, 60, 130]) was also included because
participants sometimes mixed red and blue to create
violet. Any pixels labeled as white were excluded from
further analyses because they corresponded to the
background of each drawing.
For each pixel, the comparison was done by
subtracting the pixel values from each row in the table,
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16
Figure 2. Two example line drawings and their extracted contour feature statistics. The top drawing represents anger and the bottom
drawing represents joy.
separately for the R, G, and B channels. We then took
the sum of the absolute values of the differences (i.e.,
|R| + |G| + |B|). The pixel label was the color
that gave the smallest sum of differences. With this
analysis, we were able to extract, from each drawing,
the percentage of pixels that were a certain color,
the percentage of the drawing that contained color
(i.e., non-white pixels), and the number of different
colors used in each drawing. This approach is not
perfect, as in our study it sometimes mislabeled
pixels (e.g., labeling red as pink if the red is only
lightly pressed on the paper), but it provides a fairly
good approximation of the colors present in each
drawing.
Line drawings
Histogram distributions of contour features were
extracted from each line drawing using the Mid-level
Vision (MLV) Toolbox (https://mlvtoolbox.org)
(Rezanejad, Downs, Wilder, Walther, Jepson,
Dickinson, & Siddiqi, 2019; Rezanejad & Siddiqi,
2013; Walther & Shen, 2014; Walther, Farzanfar,
Han, & Rezanejad, 2023). First, each line drawing
was transformed into a vectorized version using
the traceLinedrawingFromEdgeMap function. This
function extracts each separate line present in the line
drawing and turns it into a vector, or series of vectors,
with length and direction information. Using these
vectorized line drawings, the getContourPropertiesStats
function calculates the angularity, length, and
orientation statistics of each line drawing (see Figure 2
for examples). In addition to the contour feature distri-
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Damiano et al. 7
butions, we also calculated features of the line drawing
as a whole, such as the proportion of the drawing that
contained non-white pixels (i.e., the density of the draw-
ing) and the number of individual lines present in each
drawing.
Results
Computational emotion predictions
To determine whether emotions are depicted
commonly across individuals, we ran a leave-one-
subject-out, cross-validation procedure on each of the
four image types (i.e., artists’ color drawings, artists’ line
drawings, non-artists’ color drawings, and non-artists’
line drawings). In this procedure, we predicted the
depicted emotion of each drawing by comparing it (i.e.,
correlation) to reference drawings made by averaging
all other drawings. We found that emotions are indeed
predictable from abstract color and line drawings at an
above-chance level, meaning that commonalities exist
in how individuals depict certain emotions. A 2 × 2
ANOVA with drawing type (color vs. line drawing)
and artistic training (artists vs. non-artists) as factors
revealed a main effect of drawing type, F(1, 157) =
61.45, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.27, and interaction, F(1, 157)
= 5.37, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.02. In general, it is easier
to predict emotions from color drawings than line
drawings. The interaction revealed that, for the color
drawings, emotions were more easily predictable from
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16
Figure 3. Summary of computational and behavioral emotion prediction results. The boxes represent the means and 95% confidence
intervals. The dots in the behavioral plots represent individual (N = 242) average accuracy per condition. Significant differences in
prediction accuracy between artists’ and non-artists’ drawings are marked.
non-artists’ drawings than artists’ drawings (accuracy =
50.81% vs. 39.17%, respectively; p < 0.05). However, for
the line drawings, emotion predictability did not differ
between artists and non-artists (accuracy = 24.58% and
23.17%, respectively).
These findings suggest that non-artists’ color
drawings are more uniform within an emotion category.
In other words, a non-artist seems to draw emotions
similarly to other non-artists. In contrast, artists’
drawings tend to be unique, which leads to lower
prediction accuracies, as the computational prediction
method relies on similarities across individuals within
an emotion category.
An additional prediction analysis was performed
on the line drawings only, using contour feature
distributions as predictor variables. Using this
approach, we could also predict emotions from line
drawings made by artists and non-artists (accuracy
= 25% and 23.17%, respectively) at an above-chance
level (both p < 0.01). These prediction accuracies
did not significantly differ between artists and
non-artists (see Figure 3 for a summary of prediction
results).
Behavioral results: Emotion predictions by
humans
The computational results tell us that the degree
of uniformity of drawings within emotion categories
is lower for artists compared to non-artists (for color
drawings), but they do not tell us whether artists are
worse at being understood by other human viewers.
Thus, we ran a behavioral experiment to determine
whether emotions were more predictable by human
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Damiano et al. 8
observers from artists’ or non-artists’ drawings. Once
again, we ran a 2 × 2 ANOVA with drawing type
and art expertise as factors. Like the computational
prediction results, we found a main effect of drawing
type, F(1, 964) = 386.73, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.40, such
that human observers more easily inferred emotions
from the abstract color drawings compared with the
line drawings. Additionally, a main effect of artistic
training was found, F(1, 964) = 12.26, p < 0.001, η2 =
0.01, such that emotions were more difficult to predict
from artists’ drawings than non-artists’ drawings.
Finally, the interaction was also significant, F(1, 964) =
7.00, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.007, showing that participants
were better able to predict emotions from non-artists’
drawings compared with artists’ drawings when the
drawings contained color (accuracy = 43.06% vs. 40%,
respectively; p < 0.001), but there was no difference in
prediction accuracies between artists’ and non-artists’
line drawings (31.5% vs. 31.93%, respectively). These
results imply that non-artists are actually better than
artists at accurately depicting specific emotions in
abstract drawings, at least when using color (see
Figure 3).
Computational and behavioral error
correlations
The results thus far have shown that computational
algorithms and human participants can accurately
predict emotions from color and line drawings of
abstract artworks. We do not yet know, however,
whether humans and computers use the same type of
information to make these predictions. To explore this
question, we should not compare the accuracy scores
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al. 9

Figure 4. Average confusion matrices extracted from the behavioral and computational emotion predictions. Each cell of the
confusion matrix shows the proportion of drawings with a certain emotion label (true labels along rows) that were predicted as that
or another emotion (predicted labels along columns). The diagonal represents correct predictions, and the off-diagonal represents
errors. The gray level of a cell corresponds to the value within the cell, from white (0 = that emotion was never predicted) to black (1
= that emotion was always predicted). The correlation values shown beside the arrows represent the correlations between
off-diagonal elements (i.e., non-red cells) of behavioral and computational predictions.

but instead should compare the mistakes made by
humans and our computational models. If the error
patterns between humans and the computer are similar,
then we can assume that people use features similar
to those of the computational model to make their
emotion predictions, which is why they would make
mistakes similar to those of the computer (Walther &
Shen, 2014).
During the prediction accuracy analysis, we also
collected any mistakes in categorization made by the
computational model and by the human participants
and placed them in confusion matrices. In these
matrices, the diagonal elements represented accurate
predictions (i.e., the correct answer was “anger” and
the prediction was “anger”), and the off-diagonals
represented the confusions (i.e., the correct answer was

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 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16
“joy” but the prediction was “wonder”). Then, for the
error correlation analysis, we averaged the confusion
matrices across participants and computed the Pearson
correlation coefficient for correlating the off-diagonal
elements of the confusion matrix for two types of
predictions (i.e., the computational predictions and
human predictions).
See Figure 4 for average confusion matrices and a
summary of the error pattern correlations. Beginning
with the color drawings, we found that the error
patterns between humans and computers were highly
similar for both artists’ drawings (r = 0.74, p < 0.001)
and non-artists’ drawings (r = 0.62, p < 0.001).
Conversely, for the line drawings, the error patterns of
the computational predictions were not significantly
similar to those of humans (artists’ drawings: r =
0.31, p = 0.1; non-artists’ drawings: r = –0.07, p =
0.7). Recall that the computational predictions were
made by comparing each drawing to a set of average
reference drawings using pixel-wise correlation. Thus,
the above results mean that, for the color drawings,
humans are also performing a general color comparison
between the current drawing and a set of (internal)
references of known color–emotion associations and
that these known associations must somewhat match
those created by averaging all drawings within each
emotion category. This approach did not work for
the line drawings, however, as the average reference
maps essentially became a jumble of lines and thus
likely measured overall pixel density rather than any
contour features. This was still somewhat effective,
given that the computational predictions for the line
drawings were above chance, but this is clearly not
the (only) information people are using to make
their predictions, as shown by the low error–pattern
correlations.
Instead, when predicting emotions from line
drawings using the histograms of contour features,
we found that the human–computer correlations
were significantly similar (artists’ drawings: r = 0.47,
Figure 5. Average color usage per drawing, averaged over all drawings within an emotion category, separately for artists’ and
non-artists’ drawings. See Table 1 for the percentages of each color per emotion.
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Damiano et al. 10
p < 0.01; non-artists’ drawings: r = 0.47, p < 0.01). This
suggests that the people were comparing the contour
statistics of the drawing to an average set of statistics
that they associate with each emotion (e.g., anger might
be short and spiky, joy long and smooth), similarly
to how the computational algorithm compares the
contour statistics of one drawing to the set of reference
histograms.
Visual feature descriptions across emotions and
artistic training
It is clear from the computational and behavioral
predictions that there are similarities in color and line
usage across individuals within an emotion category,
as well as differences across emotion categories. These
similarities and differences are explored in more detail
in the following sections. Specifically, we explore the
overall density (i.e., non-white pixels) of the drawings
and the number of colors and lines used and then
identify the exact colors and types of contour features
used to depict the different emotions.
Color drawings
Beginning with the density measure, a two-way
ANOVA with emotion (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy,
or wonder) and artistic training (artists vs. non-artists)
as factors revealed only a main effect of emotion, F(5,
474) = 2.46, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.03, but not for artistic
training, F(1, 474) = 0.69, p = 0.41, η2 = 0.001. Post
hoc tests revealed that the emotion anger is more
densely drawn than wonder (proportion of colored
pixels: anger = 0.51 vs. wonder = 0.39; p < 0.05). All of
the other emotions fell in between these two but were
not statistically different from each other (disgust =
0.47; fear = 0.43; sadness = 0.50; joy = 0.43).
In terms of the average number of unique colors per
image, the two-way ANOVA revealed a main effect of
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al. 11

Emotion Examining the types of colors used in each image

across emotion types revealed that certain colors are
Color Anger Disgust Fear Sadness Joy Wonder indeed related to specific emotions. Generally, red was
used to convey anger, greens and browns to convey
Artists’ drawings disgust, black and gray to convey fear, dark blue for
Black 17.9 5.8 28.8 23.2 0.6 4.2 sadness, and yellow and pink for joy and wonder
Gray 3.2 8.8 20.1 26.2 0.4 3.4 (Figure 5; Table 1). These overall patterns do not seem
Dark brown 2.1 14.2 3.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 to differ drastically between artists and non-artists,
Light brown 3.0 4.4 1.9 0.0 5.4 3.6 although on an individual basis some artists used
Beige 0.0 2.0 0.0 0.0 1.1 2.6 unconventional colors to represent emotions in their
Pink 5.4 2.9 2.0 0.0 19.6 19.2 drawings (e.g., using pink rather than green to represent
Violet 0.0 1.2 3.3 3.5 0.5 1.3 disgust, green rather than black to represent fear).
Dark blue 0.9 2.8 15.7 30.8 2.2 12.7 This atypical color usage was sometimes found in the
Blue 0.2 0.8 9.7 10.4 3.8 7.3 non-artists’ drawings, as well, but not as often as in the
Cyan 0.0 0.0 5.6 4.5 15.9 5.5 artists’ drawings.
Green 0.0 7.2 1.6 0.0 0.6 2.0
Light green 0.0 13.2 1.9 1.4 2.9 4.5 Line drawings
Yellow 0.5 13.8 0.0 0.0 25.5 18.9
Dark yellow 1.1 15.3 0.0 0.0 7.0 3.2 As with the color drawings, the two-way ANOVA
Orange 8.1 2.2 4.0 0.0 12.1 5.7 on the density of the line drawings revealed only a
Red 57.6 5.4 2.4 0.0 2.4 5.7 main effect of emotion, F(5, 474) = 7.99, p < 0.001,
Non-artists’ drawings η2 = 0.08, but not with artistic training, F(1, 474) =
3.06, p = 0.08, η2 = 0.006. Anger was more densely
Black 15.8 12.0 29.4 19.3 0.0 1.4 drawn than all other emotions (proportion of colored
Gray 3.9 5.3 33.0 26.5 1.6 4.5 pixels: anger = 0.22, disgust = 0.16, fear = 0.14,
Dark brown 3.9 18.7 0.5 2.1 1.5 3.9 sadness = 0.14, joy = 0.10, wonder = 0.12; all p <
Light brown 3.7 4.2 0.3 0.6 7.8 4.0 0.05). In terms of average number of lines per image,
Beige 0.0 8.7 1.5 0.2 5.2 6.1 the two-way ANOVA also revealed only a main effect
Pink 10.0 1.3 1.6 0.2 13.7 13.6 of emotion, F(5, 474) = 2.57, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.03, but
Violet 0.0 0.0 4.4 2.2 0.4 0.7 not artistic training, F(1, 474) = 1.45, p = 0.23, η2 =
Dark blue 0.3 0.8 10.6 28.0 1.5 6.5 0.003. Post hoc comparisons across emotions failed
Blue 0.3 0.3 4.7 11.4 2.3 4.1 to reveal significant differences, but the overall pattern
Cyan 0.3 0.2 4.5 8.9 7.7 9.6 is that the drawings conveying negative emotions
Green 0.3 7.8 0.0 0.0 0.6 2.0 contained the greatest number of contours and the
Light green 1.5 18.5 0.6 0.0 4.4 5.0 drawings conveying positive emotions contained the
Yellow 4.7 9.2 4.9 0.0 41.5 25.2 fewest (number of contours: anger = 378.12; disgust =
Dark yellow 0.6 6.7 1.1 0.0 1.8 1.2 334.77; fear = 346.49; sadness = 377.61; joy = 141.79;
Orange 5.7 3.0 0.8 0.3 5.7 6.5 wonder = 234.72).
Red 49.0 3.3 2.1 0.3 4.3 5.7 Figure 6 shows the histograms of contour feature
distributions across emotion categories, separately
Table 1. Average color usage per drawing (in percent of
for artists’ and non-artists’ drawings. With these
non-white pixels), averaged over all drawings within an emotion
histograms, we see that, once again, the general pattern
category separately for artists’ and non-artists’ drawings.
of contour feature usage between the artists and
non-artists did not differ much. Within each feature,
there are subtle differences across emotions. These
differences are likely what people were picking up
emotion, F(5, 474) = 10.66, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.10, and on to be able to successfully infer emotions from the
a main effect of artistic expertise, F(1, 474) = 31.42, line drawings. Beginning with the angularity measure,
p < 0.001, η2 = 0.06. Anger, fear, and sadness were we see that the negative emotions have pixels in the
represented with fewer colors per drawing on average highest angularity bins, meaning that the images
(2.53, 2.49, and 2.39, respectively) than disgust and representing those emotion categories contained
wonder (3.39, and 3.53, respectively; all p < 0.001). some angular (i.e., sharp) contours, but the positive
Sadness also contained significantly fewer colors than emotions do not. For the length feature, we see a skew
joy (3.02; p < 0.05). Additionally, artists tended to use toward the shorter lines for the negative emotions
fewer colors per drawings (2.55) than non-artists (3.24; and a skew toward medium to long lines for the
p < 0.001), suggesting that artists are more minimalistic positive emotions. For the orientation feature, drawings
in their color usage. representing sadness contained the most vertical lines,

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 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16
Figure 6. Average distributions of contour features, separately for artists’ and non-artists’ drawings, for each of the six emotion
categories.
and the other emotions contained lines of various
orientations.
Discussion
This study was an exploration of how certain visual
features, such as color and contour features, are able to
convey specific emotions through abstract visual art and
whether the use of these features differs between trained
artists and non-artists. To summarize, we found that
there are indeed specific color and contour features that
are used to convey different basic emotions (e.g., anger
is generally red and more densely drawn than other
emotions, whereas sadness is conveyed by blue shades
and a higher proportion of vertical lines), allowing
for accurate predictions of emotions from both color
drawings and line drawings. Colors, however, seem to
more easily convey emotions compared with contour
features. Additionally, although small, we did find
differences in how the trained artists versus non-artists
depicted emotions—namely, artists generally used
fewer but more unique colors (as implied by a lower
computational prediction accuracy) compared with
non-artists across all emotions.
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Damiano et al. 12
Anger is red, sadness is blue: Feature
differences across basic emotions
Taking the color and line drawing results together,
we found that the negative emotions were more densely
drawn (especially anger) with a tendency to be drawn
in darker colors such as red, blue, brown, black, and
gray. The positive emotions tended to be less dense
and contain brighter colors. These findings are very
much in line with a study by van Paasschen, Zamboni,
Bacci, and Melcher (2014), who asked participants to
rate a large set of abstract artworks on valence and
arousal and found that people consistently rated dark
and complex pieces as negative and artworks with
bright colors and clear lines as positive. We replicated
these findings and extended the positive versus negative
distinction to include color–emotion associations for
more specific basic emotions.
Beginning with the color drawings, we found that
there are clear differences in color usage across different
emotions. These findings were expected based on
previous work that prompted participants with a color
label and asked them to identify all emotion labels
that they associated with that color (Jonauskaite et
al., 2020). In such studies, red is typically associated
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16
with anger, yellow with joy, brown with disgust, etc.
We found very similar results in the current study,
with almost all color–emotion associations replicating
those of Jonauskaite et al. (2020), except for disgust,
which included an additional association with green
in our study. These strong color–emotion associations
make emotions easily predictable from color drawings,
both computationally and by human observers, as
both people and computers pick up on the similarities
within an emotion category (e.g., anger is typically
depicted using red) and differences across categories
(e.g., emotions other than anger are not typically
depicted using red). This is revealed through the
strong error–pattern correlations between humans and
machines. This result implies that people use the same
types of features that our computational algorithm
uses to predict emotions from color drawings—simple
color comparisons. In other words, when trying to
infer an emotion from the color drawings, people
presumably compare each drawing to an internal
template of what color they believe each emotion
should be and then guess the emotion based on
which internal template best matches the drawing in
question. Of note, however, is that the computational
predictions on the color drawings are in fact better
(i.e., numerically higher accuracy) than the predictions
made by humans, implying that people may use other
information (perhaps shape/form) that could interfere
with the color information. In terms of understanding
emotions through color, relying solely on color
comparisons and ignoring other cues would seem to be
most useful.
We must note, however, that we could not ensure
that the colors were correctly displayed on each
participants’ computer in the behavioral task, given
that the online participants used different devices and
lived in different settings. Therefore, it is also possible
that the human emotion predictions were numerically
lower than the computational predictions simply
due to participants not perceiving the colors as they
were drawn. It would be useful to rule this possibility
out in future studies by testing participants on the
same device or calibrating each monitor to ensure
that the colors are being displayed consistently across
participants.
When color is absent (e.g., with line drawings),
differences in monitor display settings are less
problematic. Instead of hue, one must now rely
on shape or contour cues to correctly predict the
displayed emotion. In the case of line drawings, our
computational model (which uses the correlation
approach to make predictions) did not reach a high
prediction accuracy, and the error patterns were not
very similar between the human and computational
predictions. On the other hand, when we instead
predicted emotions computationally from the set of
feature histograms, the accuracy was still lower than
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Damiano et al. 13
human-level accuracy, but the error patterns were now
significantly correlated with human error patterns. This
tells us that people are indeed relying on comparing
the contour features present in each line drawing to an
internal template of the types of visual features that
should be related to each emotion (e.g., vertical lines
representing sadness).
In fact, analyses of the contours in each line drawing
revealed clear orientation and length differences that
distinguish among the basic emotion categories. We
found that vertical lines were mostly used to represent
sadness, longer lines to represent joy and wonder, and
angular lines to represent negative emotions. Also, the
sheer number of lines helped to distinguish between
anger and other emotions (i.e., the anger drawings
contained the highest number of lines and were the
most densely drawn). These results indicate that our
computational line drawing analysis using the MLV
Toolbox is an efficient way to extract and explore
contour feature distributions in line drawings. These
findings nicely replicate previous non-computational
observations (Gayen, 2021; Takahashi, 1995).
If we pit color and contour features against each
other, we find that emotions in abstract art are
more easily represented by colors than by contour
features. One potential reason may be that color
drawings contain extra information, as they may
contain shape information in addition to color.
However, as mentioned above, in this study this extra
information may have actually hindered people’s ability
to predict emotions from color drawings, and relying
solely on color would result in a higher prediction
accuracy.
A more likely reason emotions are easier to guess
from color drawings compared to line drawings is
that the associations between colors and emotions
must be stronger or more well known than the
associations between contour features and emotions.
Whether these associations are innate or culturally
learned is an interesting and important question that
unfortunately cannot be addressed in the current
study. However, the simulation theory (Johnson-Laird
& Oatley, 2021) states that mimesis (i.e., imitation)
plays a role in our emotion associations, meaning
that our abstract feature–emotion associations reflect
real-world feature–emotion associations, such as one’s
face turning red when angry. Associations between
line features and emotions seem to not be as clear
mimetically as those between colors and emotions.
Instead, contour–emotion associations seem to rely
more on the entropy of the image, with many jagged or
unpredictable lines simulating negative events such as
a broken mirror. Dissociating among several negative
emotions seems to be more difficult with contours
than with colors, potentially explaining why emotion
predictions were higher on color drawings than line
drawings.
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
Artists are seemingly worse than non-artists at
depicting basic emotions
Finally, the current study also taught us something
about the impact of artistic expertise on one’s ability
to convey emotions through abstract art. The results
of our computational predictions and subsequent
behavioral experiment suggest that differences between
artists’ and non-artists’ drawings may have had a direct
impact on the ability to infer the depicted emotion from
the artworks. It was more difficult for the new group of
naïve viewers to understand the depicted emotion when
viewing color drawings created by artists compared
with those created by non-artists. This was seemingly
due to artists being more minimalistic in their color
usage and sometimes using unconventional colors to
depict certain emotions.
It is important to acknowledge that the drawing task
we gave to the artists and non-artists was to only depict
one basic emotion at a time. Although they were free to
be as creative as they wanted, within the confines of
the drawing space, it is possible that the artists did not
find this task stimulating enough. In general, artists
mention items such individualism, divergent thinking,
and intrinsic motivation as being among the most
important factors in creating their art (Botella et al.,
2013). Therefore, the artists’ drawings in our study
were more likely unique due to each artist’s individual
style and self-expression, resulting in drawings that
were more difficult to understand than the non-artists’
drawings. Perhaps artists’ works would indeed be more
easily understood than those of non-artists if they
were conveying more complex emotions of their own
choosing through their artworks. Of course, it is also a
possibility that artists strive to explore the frontiers of
visual communication and to challenge their viewers
and therefore are not aiming to be understood in a
conventional sense. Future work could explore these
possibilities by prompting artists and non-artists with
more complex emotion labels or allowing them to create
artworks without prompts and asking them after the
fact which emotions they were attempting to convey,
and then later testing the audience’s understanding of
the artworks. Additionally, only psychology students
participated in the behavioral task. Research has shown
that artists rate abstract art as less confusing compared
with non-artists (Silvia, 2013). Perhaps a group of
expert participants would be better able to predict
emotions from their fellow artists’ drawings, which
may have been more confusing for our non-expert
participants.
Note also that we did not tell the artists and
non-artists, before they drew, that another group of
people would be trying to guess the emotions from their
drawings. If we had done so, both groups may have tried
to use more obvious color–emotion associations, and
artists, being more minimalistic in their feature usage
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14
and perhaps having a better knowledge or intuition of
these associations, may have outperformed non-artists
in their ability to depict the desired emotions.
One final possibility for why emotions were more
difficult to predict from the artists’ drawings compared
to the non-artists’ drawings could be that the artists in
our sample were still students. Artists who have been
making art for several decades could develop better or
different ways to convey emotions that may or may
not involve characteristic colors or shapes. Perhaps the
artists in our study were only just beginning to develop
this skill and thus displayed more individuality, but
they were not yet able to convey a desired emotion in a
specialized way. Follow-up studies could recruit artists
at different stages of their careers to determine whether
their unique styles eventually develop into superior
emotion transmission or whether the uniqueness
remains a detriment to the depictions of basic emotion
categories.
Conclusions
Through the manipulation of color and form, visual
abstract art is able to carry emotional information.
Here, we explored specifically how colors and lines
were used to express basic emotions. Our findings
lend support to the simulation theory, as they showed
that certain visual features are related to specific
emotions based on real-world associations that can
be “simulated” through abstract features and used by
human observers to understand the intended emotional
connotation of abstract artworks. These findings could
potentially be leveraged by product or app designers,
as well as artists, to better convey certain information
to a user or viewer. Future research should expand
on basic experiments, such as ours, using a similar
approach of emotion understanding based on contour
and color features in real abstract (e.g., geometric,
expressionist) artwork. Including artworks with more
complex feature–emotion associations will lead to a
better understanding of the multifaceted links among
visual perception, art production and appreciation, and
emotional appraisals.
Keywords: art, drawing, emotions, image features,
perception
Acknowledgments
Supported by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute
Research Fellowship 2017-18 (to P.G.), a Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2020-04097 to D.B.W),
 Journal of Vision (2023) 23(4):1, 1–16 Damiano et al.
and by long-term structural grants from the Flemish
Government (METH/14/02 and METH/21/02 to J.W.).
Commercial relationships: none.
Corresponding author: Claudia Damiano.
Email: claudia.damiano@kuleuven.be.
Address: Department of Brain and Cognition, KU
Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
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