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Published online 31 July 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.760
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Birds born to fear red
Colour intimidation in finches is innate, not learned.
Finches instinctively avoid competitors coloured red, rather than learning to fear the colour during their upbringing, Australian research concludes.1
The results are tempting researchers to suspect that in other animals, including ourselves, red's aggressive and intimidating character might also be hard-wired into brains from birth.
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I am just curious about what the authors have to say about "red" being a color of love which is totally contradictory of aggressiveness
"Red" is the color that elicits a good glutamic acid rush. I'm both a biologist and a farmer, and I know from my experience raising turkeys that poults are far less agreessive toward each other when raised uner a red heatbulb compared to poults raised under a white heatbulb, and this is directly related to abalation of [perceived] red focal points. For example, if a young turkey gets a minor cut on its face, then all of the other turkeys will continually peck at that spot and torture the poor fellow *unless* they are raised under a red light in which case they won't peck at ithe cut. It's not the actual injury or the smell of blood that makes them peck, it's the sight of red. When adult Tom's have turkey fights, they always bite at the red snood and the winning turkey will flush their facial tissue with blood while the loser pales out to blue/white and retreats away. Why do you think it's "stirring" to see a pretty girl blush? Just the sight of all that blood rushing to her facial tissue is enough to elicit an excited response in a male. The adrenaline rush you get from sexual excitement is similar to the one you get from agressive excitement, and their both elicited by the sight of blood; this is most likely due to the role of vigerous physical activity and dominance in sexual reproduction among vertebrates.
it should be possible to find a common meaning for the response to red. birds and human behave similar? do lizards also answer to the exposure to red? is it truly the color itself or is it the extreme of bright color and dark color? you know, yellow and black next to each other is used as a warning as well. but..it could also be that our response to red based upon something very old. something that hopefully does not exist anymore. this sounds like a good introduction for a science thriller, doesnt it? ;)