Need a Creative Boost? Find the Blue Room. (nytimes.com)

The only sentence in the article* that quantifies the magnitude of a color dependent effect is:

And while red guests reported feeling hungry and thirsty, yellow guests ate twice as much.

This is a pattern in science journalism:

1) scientists show statistically significant effect (sometimes minuscule in magnitude)

2) science writers describe the sign of the result without magnitude, and get some 'experts' to pontificate

3) public worries/speculates/exclaims about some new factor to think about in daily life

Yadda yadda.

[edit: *only sentence I saw after skimming ]

I'm currently in a blue room, however I don't necessarily feel anymore creative than usual. I used to write in a red room and I notice no appreciable difference in attention span, creativity or anything. In fact my best concentration (how efficiently I completed a project) was best when I was actually in a yellow room.

I do use a program called darkroom for typing, it allows you to change background color and font color easily. I usually use the old school neon-green on black, however I think I might try the equally old white on blue before a white on red and see if there's actually an effect.

I do prefer the green on black. However, the white on blue feels quite comforting when I look at it and white on red gives me a strange tingling at my forehead, which kind of disconcerts me for staring into it for hours on end.

Speaking of paint.

Yellow pigment is not the same as yellow light; nor is red pigment the same as red light; nor is blue pigment the same as blue light. :)

The light-oriented color names are fancier. (cyan, magenta, etc.)

Probably one of the most valuable things I learned as a physics student in high school!

Here's a copy of the actual report. I think the authors actually describe the color significance in the report.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1169144