Feeling blue? Sadness impairs your color perception, study says
“Feeling blue” has never been so appropriate. Researchers found out that sad people have trouble identifying blues and yellows.
In one experiments, 127 students were randomly assigned to either watch a sad animated clip or a standup comedy clip. They were then shown 48 consecutive, desaturated color patches and were asked to indicate whether each patch was red, yellow, green, or blue.
Participants who watched the sad clip were more likely to get the colors wrong—but only colors on the blue-yellow axis.
A second study had 130 students randomly assigned to watch a sad clip and an emotionally-neutral clip. Viewers of the sad clip were also worse off in identifying colors in the same color axis.
“We were surprised by how specific the effect was, that color was only impaired along the blue-yellow axis,” says Thorstenson. “We did not predict this specific finding, although it might give us a clue to the reason for the effect in neurotransmitter functioning.”
“Our results show that mood and emotion can affect how we see the world around us,” says psychology researcher Christopher Thorstenson of the University of Rochester, first author on the research. “Our work advances the study of perception by showing that sadness specifically impairs basic visual processes that are involved in perceiving color.”
Thorstenson said this is a new territory of study and should be looked into further before coming up with suitable applications.
Category: Features, Health alert
