Abstract: Color preference is a favorite color which people mentally like or preferentially choose. When shown the same color, different people will show different preferences. People tend to choose their favorite color, and avoid colors they dislike. Color, as one of the most common visual features, provides important visual information. Color can be considered as the core of visual aesthetics, and it affects people's emotional state and activities. Color preference is a significant aspect of visual experience that influences a wide spectrum of human behaviors, such as buying clothes, choosing toys, decorating homes, and designing websites. Therefore, a study of color preferences has a practical value. Relevant research can be traced back to a paper written by Cohn in 1894, which is generally regarded as the first empirical approach to color preference. According to previous study, researchers could find the general tendency of color preference. A lot of research has been reported since that time, but little agreement has been reached on the order of human color preference. The causes of inconsistent results may be due to various factors, such as personality, culture, age, or gender, that could influence individual color preference. Gender is one of the important factors that affect a person’s color preference. In many traditional cultures, some colors, especially pink and blue, have long had gender stereotypic connotations. In general, most people believe that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Parents commonly dress their baby girls in pink and their baby boys in blue. Although there is research showing that children prefer the color blue to other colors (regardless of gender), there is no evidence that girls actually have a special preference for the color pink. Former researchers at home and abroad have done plentiful studies about whether there is any gender difference in color preference. However, the evidence is mixed. This article reviewed previous studies on the gender difference of color preference from two respects: the preference for abstract colors and concrete object colors among general special populations. Many scientific studies of color preference have focused on psychophysical descriptions, also provided a few explanations of why people prefer some colors and dislike some others, and why they have color preference at all. Therefore, this paper also summarized various theoretical explanations on the cause of gender difference, such as the account of cone-opponent contrast component, ecological valence theory, the hunter-gatherer theory, social structure theory, and so on. These theoretical explanations account for gender difference of color preference from some physiological differences (such as physiological arousal and neurohormone) or psychological differences (such as mood, emotion, and recognition). Although previous research has achieved a lot, some deficiencies were still found in the methods, content, and theory. Future should use more diversified and objective methods, such as eye movements and fMRI to study the impact of color preference on other cognitive process like attention, memory, and imagination. It can help us to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to propose new highly integrated theories.

Key words: Color preference, Gender difference, General population, Special population

摘要： 颜色偏好是人在心理上所喜爱或偏好的颜色，性别是影响颜色偏好的重要因素之一。本文区分一般人群和特殊人群，结合不同的心理发展阶段，评述对抽象颜色和具体物色的偏好的性别差异研究进展，具体比较了打猎者-采摘者理论、视锥-对立对比成分理论、性别图式理论以及生态效价理论等，并且讨论分析了以往研究者在内容和理论解释等方面存在的不足。未来研究者应采用多元化的方法，深入探索颜色偏好性别差异的机制，期望整合得到解释力更强的理论观点。

关键词: 颜色偏好, 性别差异, 一般人群, 特殊人群