The influence of color on emotional perception of natural scenes

Is color a critical factor when processing the emotional content of natural scenes? Under challenging perceptual conditions, such as when pictures are briefly presented, color might facilitate scene segmentation and/or function as a semantic cue via association with scene-relevant concepts (e.g., red and blood/injury). To clarify the influence of color on affective picture perception, we compared the late positive potentials (LPP) to color versus grayscale pictures, presented for very brief (24 ms) and longer (6 s) exposure durations. Results indicated that removing color information had no effect on the affective modulation of the LPP, regardless of exposure duration. These findings imply that the recognition of the emotional content of scenes, even when presented very briefly, does not critically rely on color information.