Study Says: Your World May Really Be 'Grayer' on a Sad Day

Who has never lived a time when they felt “green (or any other color) of anger”? Or, if we had to describe a "sad day, " we'd hardly put colorful flowers in a landscape full of green and a clear blue sea, would we?

It would probably be a gray, cloudy, lifeless day. But why do we often use color expressions to describe humor or have the perception that a sad world is a colorless world?

According to research published in the journal Psychological Science, depressive mood or feelings of sadness can influence the way we notice the tones of the world around us. Thus, researchers believe that our perception and the mood-related color expressions we use may have been caused by an effect on our vision, actually caused by mood and variation.

According to the Science Daily website, it has been known for some time that mood can have various effects on visual processes. Two studies now indicate a possible link between depressive mood and reduced visual contrast sensitivity. The authors believe that sadness can affect our ability to identify colors, as contrast sensitivity is a basic visual process involved in tone perception.

Otherwise, it can be said that our mood can affect the way we see the world around us. According to lead author Christopher Thorstenson of the University of Rochester in New York, the work goes one step further in the study of perception and paves the way for new conclusions. In addition to Thorstenson, the researchers helped Adam Pazda and Andrew Elliot.

The search

To produce the research, the scientists conducted two studies, one with 127 people and the other with 130. In the first, part of the participants watched a video aimed at improving their mood, while the other part watched a sad clip. In the second, the happy video gave way to a neutral one. Both groups, after watching the videos, were tested with 48 color palettes, which should indicate the colors red, yellow, green or blue.

In the end, the work showed that both participants who got the mood better and those who watched the neutral video had no difficulty in indicating the colors. Already people who were induced to be in a sad mood showed less accuracy in the correctness of the shades of the blue-yellow axis and a good result in the axis of red and green colors.

This leads to the conclusion that the feeling of sadness may be specifically responsible for the differences in tone perception. The fact that the same “sad participants” presented opposite results with different color axes confirms that their level of attention, dedication or effort did not influence the final result.

Thorstenson pointed out that the researchers did not expect to get such a precise result that showed a change only to the blue-yellow axis. "We did not foresee such a specific conclusion, although it gives us a clue as to why the dopamine neurotransmitter works, " he added.

And you, how do you see the world when it's a sad day? Submit your report on the Mega Curious Forum