![]() Sadness is not the same as clinical depression, of course. Students' emotional reactions were self-reported. As the study was conducted on college students who were participating in the experiment for credit, common practice in the field, they had no way to test for the possibility of bias with their data. In the second study, they wanted a more controlled contrast - sadness versus neutral. ![]() In the first study the researchers wanted to test an obvious contrast, sadness versus amusement, but the test was limited by the lack of a control group. But Thorstenson cautions that this connection is still speculative. And dopamine can affect the eye's sensitivity. Studies have shown that perception of the blue-yellow axis is also associated with clinical disorders such as depression and ADHD that involve disregulation of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Scholars since the 19th-century German poet Goethe have tried to understand the association between emotion and color perception. Sadness could impair the eye's ability to detect contrast in a few ways: by decreasing the brain's arousal or responsiveness ability, which leads the pupils to contract, reducing the amount of light that enters the retina. It may be that sadness impairs the ability to perceive colors because it interferes with low-level contrast sensitivity, Thorstenson says, which can in turn affect higher order color judgment.Ĭontrast sensitivity is your visual system's ability to distinguish between different levels of light and color. The studies were published in the journal Psychological Science. "We were not initially expecting there to be differences between the axes," Thorstenson says. So what was going on? Human vision uses three color axes (red-green, blue-yellow, black-white) that make up all the colors we see. But no difference was detected in students who looked at colors on the red-green axis. The students who watched the sad video clip could not identify blue-yellow colors as accurately as the group that watched the neutral screen saver. So in a second study, 151 students were assigned a color perception task with a sad video clip in color and an emotion-neutral screen saver in black and white. It was unclear whether sadness impaired color perception or cheer enhanced it. The students who saw the happy clip kept their sense of color. The students who saw the sad clip were worse at perceiving colors on the blue-yellow axis. Then the students completed a color perception task on a computer monitor and filled out a questionnaire rating their emotions. In two experiments, study lead author Christopher Thorstenson, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Rochester, and colleagues Adam Pazda and Andrew Elliot randomly assigned 129 undergraduates to two groups and showed them emotion-inducing color video clips - either an amusing one of a comedian or a sad one where a Lion King cub watches his father fall off a cliff and sobs next to his corpse. Here, even common sadness dulled the world's hues. Earlier research linked depression to a decreased ability to see color. But it looks like feelings can influence how we see colors, too. ![]() Numerous studies have hinted that what you see influences what you feel. We explain the errors and the retraction in this post.įeeling blue as summer ends? If your world seems colorless, it could be more than just a metaphor. ![]() Although I believe it is already clear, I would like to add an explicit statement that this retraction is entirely due to honest mistakes on the part of the authors. ![]()
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