Stimulant Colours - Strident hues at full intensity

This is a group of yellows often used to reflect impulsiveness and spontaneity. They can give the impression of flair and effervescence, for example, as well as the skill of the virtuoso. In childrens' paintings, on the other hand, they often signify excitement and naivity (A & H). All these qualities are summed up in Lüscher's description of them as the Heteronomous Active colours. Such yellows can well be a sign of initiative and the entrepreneur, especially when used with appropriate dash and aplomb. In this sense they can also be indicators of the experimental and empirical. In Jung's thinking they have the archetypal yellowness of the sun, itself a symbol of wisdom and the joy of enlightenment. In Freudian terms, the excitement of the yellows has been analysed as being urethral.

Magenta is a peak stimulus red, most often a sign of ostentation - for example, a symbol of seduction, cocquetry, panache or ritualistic display. (Lüscher). It can also symbolise subtle powers of discrimination and / or aesthetic abilities. For children Magenta has been said to express a magical state of enchantment and wish fulfillment. (A & H)

For clinical reasons, Lüscher sees peak stimulus red differently. For him Red Orange is the peak stimulus red, seen by him as an erotic symbol, relating to the maelstrom of human interaction, perhaps because it is the heightened colour of Caucasian flesh.

These are colours with 'bite' and they can also be an expression of wit. Being the visceral colours of extratensive excitement, they can carry a sense of striving or conation (Hormic psychology) They are, for example, the colours of those 'butterflies in the tummy' sensations one may have in a crisis. A 'sucking' colour some psychologists say - sharp, citric and ascerbic. According to Dr. S.G Schmidt of the Psychosomatic Society of Berlin, they are the colours often specially liked by patients with gastric ulcers, because, perhaps, they are synaesthetically like the taste of sour fruit, and are a stimulus to the production of saliva. They are often described as unrelaxing colours, busy colours, the sign of the workaholic. Sometimes they are conceived as expressing just bitterness, and thought of as symbols of jealousy.

These are blues that reflect a desire for the kind of freedom and liberation one might experience under the Mediterranian sky. (Lüscher 1949). In popular psychology they are the buoyant and light-hearted expression of an open-mind and a free spirit. They are breezy and genial, a reflection of the blithe and the debonair. In childrens' work they can be a sign of aspiration and sublimation as well as wanting to be free. (A & H)