THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YELLOW 457 



discriminated yellow. Miss Shinn found that yellow was her niece's 

 first favorite color, and, in her twenty-eighth month, she had a special 

 fondness for daffodils and for a yellow gown. Mrs. Moore found 

 that in the sixteenth week her child chose a yellow ball in preference to 

 a red, and, later, in the forty-fifth week, six times out of ten preferred 

 the yellow ball. Binet's child could not readily distinguish yellow, but 

 was especially successful with orange. A lady who made some exper- 

 iments for me with a Belgian child one year of age found that when 

 successively offered a red poppy and a yellow poppy, then red, white 

 and yellow poppies, finally red, white, orange and yellow poppies, she 

 on all three occasions chose the yellow poppy, though on the third trial 

 she hesitated between the orange and the yellow poppies; when she 

 passed yellow poppies growing she would point to them and want them, 

 and was also observed to contemplate admiringly a sunflower, though 

 usually indifferent to flowers of other colors, except pink geraniums. 

 At this age, no doubt, the preference for yellow is mainly a question of 

 luminosity, for the careful investigations of Garbini on a large number 

 of children showed that under the age of three they may almost be 

 described as color-blind and experience a special difficulty in distin- 

 guishing yellow, which even at a somewhat later age is often confused 

 with orange. 4 When children show genuine color preferences, they 

 appear, like adults, to be only to a slight degree attracted by brilliancy, 

 but to a large extent by depth of saturation. This was found to be the 

 case by Aars, who in testing color preferences used colored papers of 

 similar brilliancy and depth. His results indicate that, as Barnes had 

 already found, children's love of yellow diminishes with age; even be- 

 tween the ages of four and seven, though yellow was still one of the most 

 favorite colors of the boys, it had ceased to be in any degree a favorite 

 color with the girls. Lobsien, at Kiel, investigating the color prefer- 

 ences of a large number of school girls between the ages of eight and 

 fourteen, reached congruent results; he adopted the method of offer- 

 ing the colors in pairs, and found that while orange was never pre- 

 ferred to any other color, there was a tendency at all ages to prefer 

 yellow to green and usually to violet, but never to red or blue. 5 These 

 results harmonize with the conclusion of Garbini that in discrimination 

 of color girls are more precocious than boys, though it must be added 

 that, as in physical development, the period of adolescence brings to an 

 end this greater rapidity of girls in development ; thus Wissler, in com- 

 paring the color preferences of freshmen and seniors of both sexes, 

 found (as Jastrow had previously found) that with age there is a 

 shifting of preference towards the violet end of the spectrum which is 

 the favorite end of men, red being that of women. 



* Garbini, Archivio per I'Antropologia, 1894, fasc. 1. 



6 Lobsien, Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie und Physiologic der Sinnesorgane, 

 1904, p. 42. 



