Back in the 1960s, almost every school interior was green. Whether this was supposed to camouflage dirt or inspire learning, I don't know, but two-tone green seemed to crop up in every institution until that very association makes it depressing to me. Then in 1979, prison authorities started painting their facilities pink in order to make the (male) inmates less aggressive and even weaker. The science behind that idea went much further back into research on color. But did that research hold any water? Half as Interesting tells the story.
The upshot is that the psychology of color is a lot more complex than any one study (or two) can show. Is Baker-Miller pink really calming, or effeminate, or culturally dependent? Multiply that confusion by thousands of colors, and you see why the question is still open. -via Digg