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I recently reviewed a style guide document and came across a passage concerning colors. In the text, different colors are attributed to different emotions, e.g.:
Orange stands for lust for life
or
White is the color of innocence
My initial reaction was, this sounds quite esoteric to me. While researching this online, I found similar claims, including here on ux.stackexchange, (e.g. in this answer: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/33294/3311).
Is there any research supporting these claims?
Yes there is quite a lot of research on mood, perception, and bias related to color.
The terms you are looking for are color theory and color psychology. Doing a search on these terms will yield the body of research.
The research paper Effects of Color on Emotions should provide a decent overview as well as a good set of references if you need to dig deeper.
It's probably outside the scope of this answer to discuss at length how emotions are affected by color, but a lot of the mood and emotional qualities ascribed to color are actually the results of visual perception and color biases rather than a direct psychological link between color and emotion.
You're right to be skeptical of articles which claim a direct link between color and emotions (e.g. "red is sexy"). This article from Psychology Today points out that the relationship between color and emotion is complex, and depends on the object being evaluated, convention, context, culture, and other variables. So a simplistic color X = emotion Y relationship is misleading.
It's possible that there is a culturally specific answer to this but, as far as I know, there aren't any colors that have universally significant connotations.
Even within cultures one should take these findings with a grain of salt.
White may mean purity in one culture and death in another. Someone to whom white is the color of death isn't going to be put off by stackexchange because it has a white background; the same as someone to whom black is the color of death isn't going to be put off by stackexchange's use of black lettering.
