The irregular unpleasant forms generally retarded the feeling-tone
for the enclosed color when that color appeared to have lost some
of its accustomed agreeableness. When, however, the contrast in
feeling-character between the form-element and the color-element as
such was noted as marked, the feeling-character of the color was more
often hastened than retarded. These same forms in almost every case (of
nearly two months' work for seven subjects) hastened the feeling-tone
for the corresponding disagreeable color. Often again pleasant colors
changed the feeling-tones for these irregular forms. In such cases the
influence could not be attributed to the effect of unpleasant forms
upon feeling-tones.
Statistics alone seem insignificant here. Each variety of affective
experience in itself presents its own peculiar difficulties. In a
great number of tests the affective phases of the experiences were
all described in such terms as to suggest that too general a grouping
of them would not mean much. Often when one thought, after a careful
choice of the stimuli to be used, that the experiment would show that
feelings whose prominent characteristics were those of excitement or
tension, for example, were exerting an influence upon some other kind
of feeling, introspection would reveal the fact that altogether other
phases of the experience were the pronounced elements. Examples of what
at first appeared to be capricious results illustrate the baffling
nature of the problem here dealt with. Red is very pleasant. The oval
with the bulging side is repulsive. This combination caused no marked
retardation in the time required for a feeling-tone to develop. The
blue, not so markedly pleasant alone, with the same bulging oval as
its frame, had its feeling-tone changed, and the time-development
quite perceptibly hastened. This same blue color with an upright oval
as its frame produced a feeling-tone much more pleasant, also with
marked hastening of the speed-development of its feeling-character.
The pleasant-unpleasant dimension of the feeling clearly cannot alone
furnish one with an explanation of these different phenomena. The red
under normal conditions, _i. e._, if not influenced by either favorable
or unfavorable coexisting feeling-tones, aroused its peculiar and not
necessarily pervasive kind of physiological process. Likewise all our
evidence goes to show that the feeling for blue is correlated with a
peculiar physiological process, not so deeply seated in the organism,
and not so satisfactorily coördinated, or "definite." Now the specific
feeling-tone for forms arises when the imitative adjustment called
for is successfully accomplished. In the first combination cited
above the feeling-tone for red, being mild, soothing, more pervasive
than blue, but lacking in the exciting character, is correlated with
processes not so easily influenced by the reactions occasioned by
the presented forms. Subjects say that it does not call for "surface
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