Mood & emotion can affect the way you see colors: study

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"Feeling blue," "green with envy," "seeing red," "yellow-bellied," "gray mood"—these are several mood idioms that feature colors in them, and now, science has proven that colors and moods are indeed related.

NPR reports that Christopher Thorstenson, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Rochester, together with colleagues Adam Pazda and Andrew Elliot conducted a study involving 129 respondents who were subjected to emotion-inducing color video clips. The respondents were divided into two—the first group viewed a clip of an amusing comedian, while the second group watched a clip of Lion King, in which Mufasa is murdered.

The respondents were then asked to complete a color perception task on a computer monitor and rate their emotions via a questionnaire. Results showed that the students who viewed the Lion King clip had difficulty in perceiving colors on the blue-yellow axis. Their happy clip viewing counterparts, however, did not have any color perception problems.

Thorstenson and his team conducted a second study in which one group viewed a sad video clip in color, and another group viewed an emotionally neutral screen saver with only the colors black and white. Results showed that those who viewed the sad clip could not identify blue-yellow colors as accurately as their counterparts who viewed the screen saver.

This led the study authors to conclude that mood affects the way we see color. According to the Huffington Post, Thorstenson said: "It was interesting that we have so many metaphors that link emotion and color perception. We were curious whether there really was a link between sadness and how people see color."

"We were not initially expecting there to be differences between the axes," he further explained. "Our studies build on previous research showing that mood and emotion can influence how we perceive the world around us."

According to TIME, the study is also linked to the possible importance of dopamine—a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers—to a person's sight.

Thorstenson said: "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 colors, too."

Huffington Post reports that according to psychologists Jonathan Zadra and Gerald Clore, who wrote a review of studies on emotion and perception in 2011, "Psychologists have tacitly viewed perception, cognition, emotion, and other basic processes as separable phenomena to be studied in isolation. Increasingly, however, we are coming to see relevant areas of the brain and the processes they support as highly interactive."