The purpose of this study is to identify whether young children can associate colors with emotion, and if there are any changes across development. For this purpose, a study consisting of three tasks (questionnaire regarding color preferences, color‐emotion matching task, and color assessment task) was designed, and was conducted among four age groups of elementary school aged 7–12 (M = 8.11), junior high school aged 13–15 (M = 14.1), high school aged 16–18 (M = 17.1), and university students aged 19–23 (M = 20.1). In total, 172 subjects participated in this study. Red and blue hues were most favorite colors across all age groups. However, gold was the most favorite color among elementary school students (p < 0.05). White was the most popular color for the bedroom (p < 0.01), followed by light blue. In the color‐emotion matching task, elementary school students associated all the negative emotions with black (p < 0.01). In addition, elementary school students used a greater number of color varieties for the emotions compared to other participants, and the number of color varieties decreased as the subjects grow older. From the color assessment task, it was observed that elementary school students are the only participants who assessed all the colors with all the feelings of very unhappy/unhappy, neutral, and happy/very happy (p < 0.05). The results further suggested that junior high, high school, and university students seem to agree more on color assessments and the results are quite similar across these age groups. In sum, it was concluded that children do associate colors with emotion. Moreover, the changes across development were observed in all the three tasks.