THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RED. 375 



that he was looking at a red object. Many years ago Layeock referred 

 to the case of a lady who could not hear to look at anything red, and 

 Elliston also had a lady patient to whom red was very obnoxious, and 

 who, when put into a room with red curtains, drank seven quarts of fluid 

 a day. I am not aware that any such hyperesthesia exists in the case 

 of other colors. It is also noteworthy that the morbid affection in 

 which color is seen when it does not exist is most usually a condition in 

 which red is seen (erythropsia), yellow being the color most frequently 

 seen after red (a condition called xanthopsia); the other colors are very 

 rarely seen, and Hilbert, in his monograph on the pathology of the 

 color sense, considers that this is due to the fact that red and yellow 

 make the most intense effect on the sensorium, which thus becomes 

 liable not only to direct but to reflected irritation, in the absence of any 

 external color stimulus. There are other facts which show that of all 

 colors red is that which acts as the most powerful stimulus on the 

 organism. Miinsterberg, in some interesting experiments which he 

 made to illustrate the motor power of visual impressions as measured 

 by their arresting action on the eye-muscles, found that red and yellow 

 have considerably more motor power in stimulating the eye than the 

 other colors. It may be added also that, as Quantz has found, we over- 

 estimate the magnitude of colors of the less refrangible part of the 

 spectrum and underestimate the others. 



After puberty blue seems still to maintain its position, but red has 

 now come more to the front, while yellow has definitely receded; al- 

 though so favorite a color in classic antiquity, it is rarely the preferred 

 color among ourselves. J. Cohn in Germany found that among a dozen 

 students it was never in any degree of saturation the preferred color, 

 while at Cornell Major found that all the subjects investigated consid- 

 ered yellow and orange either unpleasant or among the least pleasant 

 colors. 



While blue seems to be the color most usually preferred by men, red 

 is more commonly preferred by women, who also show a more marked 

 predilection for its complementary green. Whether the feminine love 

 of red shows a fine judgment we could better decide if we knew among 

 what classes of the population red lovers and blue lovers respectively 

 predominate; it may be noted, however, that the necessities of dress 

 give the most ordinary woman an acquaintance with the elementary 

 aesthetics of color which the average man has no occasion to acquire. 

 In any case it might have been anticipated that, even though the 

 typically 'cold' color should appeal most strongly to men, the most 

 emotional of colors should appeal most strongly to women. 



