How feeling sad can turn your world blue

Certain emotions can affect our ability to perceive colour, new research has found. Photo: Thinkstock

If you’re feeling down, the world can seem dreary and grey - and now new research reveals that may be in a literal sense too.

A new study published in the journal Psychological Science shows a direct link between a person’s ability to perceive colour and their emotions.

“Our results show that mood and emotion can affect how we see the world around us,” said lead study author Christopher Thorstenson. “Our work advances the study of perception by showing that sadness specifically impairs basic visual processes that are involved in perceiving colour.”

According to Thorstenson, it’s no surprise that colour is often associated with descriptions of people’s moods, such as ‘feeling blue’ or ‘bright’ and ‘colourful’ for happier folks. “We thought that maybe a reason these metaphors emerge was because there really was a connection between mood and perceiving colours in a different way,” he said.

During the experiment participants were randomly assigned to watch either a sad-film clip (a particularly devastating scene from The Lion King) or a stand-up comedy skit.

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Everyone was asked to look at red, yellow, green and blue patches that had been muted towards grey and asked to name the colours. People scored on how accurate their colour perception was, and then were asked to complete an emotional evaluation.

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They found that sad people had a hard time differentiating between colours on the blue-yellow colour axis. In the second experience, people were asked to watch either a neutral or a sad clip where, again, those who watched a sad video less accurately identified colours on the blue-yellow axis.

In other words, those who felt sad found it difficult to differentiate colours from grey. The researchers hypotheses that it may have something to do with the relationship between dopamine and the blue-yellow colour axis, although more research is required.

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“We know dopamine is important in mood disorders like depression and ADHD, but there might be something going on with how dopamine affects how we see colours, too,” Thorstenson said. “How we feel can really influence how we see the world around us.”

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