by Abbi Sharp

Created on: April 07, 2010

It's lunchtime, so as you pull in to your favorite fast food place and get in line you look at the menu. Everything looks so delicious. Each red trimmed meal looks fantastic, as do the selection of desserts and milkshakes. You order you meal, supersizing everything, and pull away with your meal, and wonder how your eyes got so much bigger than your stomach.The answer is color.

Your favorite fast food chains spend big bucks on design specialists and others who know the psychology of color. Take a closer look the next time you go in for a quick bite to eat. What color do you see the most of? Is it red? Or, is it orange. You will probably notice that the entire restaurant has some kind of red in it or a red trim. The color red quickens the heart rate, prompts the release of adrenalin into the blood stream, and promotes impulse buying. Orange has the same result, but can cause feelings of intense hunger.

Colors such as red and orange (and almost all other colors) affect the body and the emotions. Red is a color that is common to Valentine's Day, symbolizing love and the expression of that love. It is a color that is connected with the psychological stimulation of love, hunger, and passion. This is the same color as blood and muscle tissue, thus representing life and death. Red can be distracting to a child who has ADD or ADHD, and if you painted a wall or an entire room a fiery red, it will negatively effect your mood, making you extremely hot, agitated, or angry.

Light Purple, like lavender  also has an affect linked to passion and love. A deep purple gives off the impression of royalty. It was an extremely difficult color to produce a few centuries ago, so it has been linked to royalty for quite a while.

Blue can make a person feel colder, and if you were to paint an entire room dark blue you may feel that the walls are about to close in around you.

 Let's take a look at green. Green can have several different meanings depending upon the shade. A deep forest green tends to signify money or elitism. Green mixed with more yellow can make people think of sickness. A good way to control excessive eating might just be the color that surround the foods. I'm not saying go out and purchase an olive colored fridge (unless you really want to commit to that as a style), but put something that yellowish-green in the front of your icebox or pantry and just see what happens. It may just cause you to loose your appetite.

Just as green has diverse affects, depending upon the shade, yellow also has different effects on the mood. Light bright yellow, as apposed to yellow green, can lighten your mood and make you feel happier and healthier. Some studies say that it can increase your memory. It can also make you feel warmer. A teacher of color theory told the story of an office where the workers constantly complained of being cold and that the thermostat needed to be adjusted. Over the weekend a change was made, but it wasn't a change in temperature. On Monday the office workers seemed to notice that it felt warmer. The change was that the walls were painted a very light shade of yellow.

So, does color affect your mood? Most definitely.

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