The ERP results further revealed distinctive neural processing stages for pink–masculine stimuli (i.e., in comparison to the other three types of stimuli) in P200, N300, N400, and P600. The behavioral results showed that pink–masculine stimuli elicited a longer response time and lower accuracy than blue–masculine stimuli in the participants, while no such differences were observed between pink–feminine and blue–feminine conditions. Event-related potential (ERP) signals were concurrently recorded in order to identify the temporal dynamics of gender stereotypical interference effect.

We presented stereotypically masculine or feminine occupation words in either pink or blue colors to Chinese college students in a modified Stroop paradigm, in which participants were asked to classify each occupation word by gender as quickly and accurately as possible. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neuropsychological processing basis of this effect in contemporary Chinese society. Pink and blue colors have been found to associate with gender stereotypes in previous Western studies. Furthermore, rather than being subordinate to language/text, colour is a crucial semiotic mode in the meaning-making process of danmu comments, which adds further layers to understanding the discourse and semiotic practices on Chinese social media. Based on these findings, we suggest that colour also works as a contextualization cue, whose function has to be understood in conjunction with cultural knowledge, the texts of the comments and contextual references provided by videos. Besides, colours are used by danmu comment makers to create cohesion in danmu comments and marshal their comments into the collective colouring act. Drawing on social semiotic multimodal analysis, this paper conceptualizes colours as a semiotic mode, in which specific colours are “turned on” to fulfill two functions, namely: a) enacting fan relation and b) expressing judgement and affect triggered by video contents, signaling a change of context from video commenting to a collective act of colouring video comments. This paper contributes to this area by studying the use of colour when video comments are produced in the form of danmu on a Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili. While non-linguistic modes have been recognized to play an important role in meaning-making, less attention has been paid to the creative use of colour on social media.

Social media provide their users with various semiotic resources for meaning-making in different modes (e.g., text, image, colour, etc.).

Color war 2008