Expressing emotion is not always easy. When asked “what do you feel,” one would first need to accurately identify the emotion they experience and then communicate it clearly to others. However, some people are good at recognizing their emotions while others might struggle. Linguistic skills and vocabularies also play a role, which could limit the way emotions are verbally described.
Researching the emotional experiences of others can therefore become a challenge. How can we help research participants better understand and express their emotions?
Using colour as a visual tool
In the Journal of Business Venturing Insights article “Giving colour to emotions in entrepreneurship,” I introduce colour as a visual means for researching emotion. The association between colour and emotion has long been of interest to artists, philosophers, and psychologists alike. Various experiments throughout the decades have demonstrated that certain colours can evoke specific emotions, for instance, and colour has been greatly utilized in marketing and design to influence perceptions and behaviours.
With such a strong link between colour and emotion, I argue that colour can also offer interesting possibilities for understanding the role of emotion in entrepreneurship. There is the potential of colour to enhance the reflective processes of entrepreneurs and to serve as an alternative means to communicate emotion, yet this potential has remained untapped so far.
To demonstrate the potential of colour as a visual tool in emotion research, I introduce the colour timeline approach. In short, the colour timeline approach combines in-depth interviewing, visual timeline, and colour selection activity. During the interview, research participants are invited to construct a visual timeline based on their work or life history and to represent their emotion during each period with a colour. A discussion then followed around the colours they have selected and why.
How does colour support emotion research?
The colour timeline approach has been used to explore the emotional experiences of women who transitioned to self-employment in rural Indonesia. Drawing on this experience, three key insights were generated around the use of colour and the colour timeline approach.
1. Colour can give form to complex emotions
Emotions are rich and complex, which is why expressing and defining one’s emotion can be a challenge for many. By using colour, participants are able to give a physical form to their emotion, making their intangible experience more tangible. Once their emotion is represented with a colour, it becomes easier to articulate their subjective feelings in words.
2. Colour can draw out significant emotional events that are central to one’s (life) history
People do not always know what they feel and why. Through the colour selection activity and the discussion that follows, participants are invited to reflect more deeply and become more aware of their emotional experience. For some participants, this encouraged them to provide a more detailed description of their subjective feelings and the context surrounding them.
3. Colour timeline provides visual space for holistic emotional reflection
Participants can use the colour timeline as a physical tool that allows them to make sense of their emotionsand experiences through their visual senses in addition to their cognition. The colour timeline also allows participants to see their different emotional experiences as a whole and to reflect on one period based on how they have given colour to others.
Who would benefit from using colour?
As a research tool, colour expands the methodological toolbox available to creatively examine emotion. In the field of entrepreneurship, colour can be used to develop a more nuanced understanding of specific emotions that are central in the entrepreneurial process (e.g., entrepreneurial passion) or to examine the interplay between positive and negative emotions. When used through the colour timeline approach, colour can be especially useful for exploring emotion throughout the whole entrepreneurial journey and for understanding the role of emotion over time.
While the focus of the JBV Insights article is on the use of colour to examine emotion in entrepreneurship, other (organizational) phenomena or settings could also benefit from using colour as a visual tool. Emotion is central in organizational and everyday lives, and colour can be used to gain in-depth understanding of the subjective experiences of individuals (or groups) during emotionally laden events.
In organizations, colour and the colour timeline approach can, for instance, be used as a method of inquiry following a leadership restructuring, adoption of a new policy, or other forms of organizational change. Colour can also provide potential benefits as an additional means for evaluating training provisions and interventions by creating space for engaged dialogue and enabling participants to provide enhanced feedback.
Author bio
Bernadetta Aloina Ginting-Szczesny is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Entrepreneurship at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. Her research is focused on the socio-psychological dimensions of entrepreneurship and the transformative potential of entrepreneuring for individuals or groups in constrained contexts. She also has an interest in advancing visual methodologies in entrepreneurship research.
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