Emotional Qualities of Colours added to humourous illustrations

Many humorous illustrations concerning office work and published in Italy in national periodicals and specific books were firstly collected. Three typical illustrations were selected and arranged in four versions: black and white; with alarming and serious colorations or reassuring and playful ones, or mixed hues, using acrylics. Each version was evaluated individually and given a humour score from 0 (minimum) to 10 (maximum), by 116 University students or ministry employees of both genders. The hypothesis was that average humour scores would be significantly greater with the reassuring and playful colorations, lower with the alarming and serious hues, and intermediate with the mixed colourings or black and white versions. The colorations are based on indications from works by Bonaiuto (1978), Biasi & Bonaiuto (2006), Biasi, Bonaiuto & Giannini (2007), Biasi, Bonaiuto & Levin (2014). The statistical analysis includes means and standard deviations, Student t test and others. The results fully confirmed the working hypotheses.