초록
The purpose of this study is to explore how people's evaluation and preference on color palettes differ based on their cultural background. This study used the same color palettes developed by Youngsoon Park and Denise Guerin(1992). Fourteen representative adjectives are used to analyze the meaning evaluation and preference on the six color palletes. 425 undergraduate students are se-lected from Korea, Japan, U.S. and England and ques-tionnaire was used as survey instrument. The results show that there are significant differences among the four countries in the meaning evaluation and preferences on the color palettes and the characteristics of color palettes influence the differences among the countries. The differences among the countries decrease in case of color palettes composed of warm color with low or medium value difference and chroma difference, while the differences increase in case of color palette characterized by strong color contrast with high or medi-um value difference and chroma difference. The result of color meaning evaluation can be catego-rized into Western and Eastern culture. Korea and U.S., and Japan and U.S. showed significant differences in the most words and Korea and Japan showed similarities in the most words. Therefore it can be concluded that cul-tural backgrounds related to race, region and history in-fluence the color meaning evaluation and preference. Fur-ther study should explore the relationship between color and culture using more various color instruments such as color palettes in order to categorize the various aspects of culture.