What are the colours of Health and Sickness?

The aim of this study is to investigate if there are colours that are associated with the words “Health” and“Sickness”. The study was conducted in three countries, Sweden, Russia and Uganda, to see if there are culturaldifferences in the way people associate colours with the words. In each country, there were two groups of subjects,one group included colour professionals, such as design or art students, and the other group consisted of morecommon people that had no specific colour training. The subjects were asked to match each of the words withonly one colour. They could choose colours from the chart consisting of 27 colour samples selected from the NCSAtlas. The collected data were analysed separately by three values, specifying the hue, the degree of blackness,and the chromaticness. We revealed that colour associations with the words “Health” and “Sickness” usingcolours vary between different countries. However, we revealed unique colours with the strongest links to thewords “Health” and “Sickness” for all of the experimental groups. That indicates that there are universalassociations with colours that can help to promote health and wellness