text: Author Contributions C. A. Thorstenson and A. D. Pazda developed the study concept and contributed to the study design. Testing and data collection were performed by C. A. Thorstenson and A. D. Pazda. C. A. Thorstenson and A. D. Pazda performed the data analysis and interpretation under the supervision of A. J. Elliot. C. A. Thorstenson drafted the manuscript, and A. D. Pazda and A. J. Elliot provided substantive revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. 
   
   Abstract 
   
   Past research has shown that emotion can influence low-level visual processes, including color perception, that may play a role in higher-order vision. Moreover, the prevalence of linguistic pairings between emotions and color words suggests that emotional experience and color perception may be linked. The purpose of the present research was to test whether emotion influences color perception. We did this by experimentally manipulating emotion with video clips in two experiments (specifically, sadness and amusement in Experiment 1, and sadness and neutral emotion in Experiment 2) and measuring color perception (specifically, accuracy in identifying desaturated colors). The results of both experiments showed that sadness impaired color perception along the blue-yellow color axis but not along the red-green color axis. ||||| TIME Health For more, visit TIME Health 
   
   The world seems dreary, gloomy and gray when you’re feeling blue. In fact, being down in the dumps might even affect how you perceive the color blue. 
   
   A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science shows a direct connection between a person’s ability to perceive color and their emotions. 
   
   “Color is such an important part of our experience,” says lead author Christopher Thorstenson, a psychologist at the University of Rochester. There’s a reason, he says, that common descriptive phrases of the world include “colorless,” “gray,” and “feeling blue” by sad people, and “bright” and “colorful” by happier folks. 
   
   MORE: This May Be Why You’re Seeing The Dress As White and Gold 
   
   Psychologists have long known that emotions have a direct influence on what is called “low-level visual processes,” or simple perceptions of space and form. That’s because your visual processes require some chemical input from your brain that might affect how you process what you see. Sadness decreases arousal, for example, which in turn limits the amount of light entering the retina and reduces your visual acumen. A gloomy mood lowers dopamine, which may impair neutrotransmitters in the retina. And depression has been linked to a deficit in the ability to differentiate colors, meaning the world might be viewed as a fuzzier, less vivid place for some people feeling sad. 
   
   In the experiment, the researchers randomly assigned people to one of two groups. Those who were assigned “sadness” watched a sad film clip: a particularly heart-wrenching scene from The Lion King. Those in the “amusement” group were shown a standup skit. Everyone was then asked to look at red, yellow, green and blue patches that had been desaturated of color and muted to gray. “Some of the patches are pretty difficult [to discern],” Thorstenson admits, saying that it often takes a bit of intent staring to figure out their shade. People were scored on how accurate their color perception was, and they then completed an emotional evaluation. Another part of the study had people watch a neutral desktop screensaver and perform the same tasks. 
   
   The result: sad people had a hard time differentiating between shades along the blue-yellow color axis. Intriguingly, however, people who were sad did not have problems seeing colors in the red-green spectrum—possibly because of an evolutionary need to see red as an anger response, Thorstenson speculates. (“Seeing red”, therefore, might also be a more literal phrase than we once thought.) 
   
   The fact that Thorstenson and his team only saw differences in color perception along the blue-yellow axis means that this isn’t just a fluke, he explains. Had sadness simply reduced chemical arousal or engagement, the results would probably have indicated that color perception across all spectrums were affected, but that wasn’t the case. It also highlights the possible importance of dopamine in sight, something researchers are hoping to focus on more in the future. “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,” Thorstenson says. 
   
   “How we feel can really influence how we see the world around us,” he says. ||||| “Feeling blue” might be more than just a metaphor. 
   
   Indeed, how we feel about the world can play a huge role in how we see it, according to a new study in the journal Psychological Science. Feeling sad can keep us from seeing in certain colors, as though we live in Dorothy’s Kansas. But a good mood can bring those colors back into the world, just like a tornado trip to Oz. 
   
   “We were already deeply familiar with how often people use color terms to describe common phenomena, like mood, even when these concepts seem unrelated,” the study’s lead author Christopher Thorstenson said in a statement for the Association for Psychological Science. “We thought that maybe a reason these metaphors emerge was because there really was a connection between mood and perceiving colors in a different way.” 
   
   Thorstenson was right. All it took was a clip from a cartoon to make people start seeing differently. 
   
   Participants in the study, which took place at the University of Rochester in New York, were invited to watch the two-minute scene from “The Lion King” in which Mufasa is killed. To the mournful strains of Elton John’s score, they watched Simba’s eyes widen and fill with tears as he nuzzled against his fallen father. The clip, which apparently is often used in psychology studies, is scientifically proven to induce irresistible sadness at the plight of the orphaned lion cub. 
   
   Others participants were shown a clip from a stand-up comedy routine or a neutral screen saver. 
   
   Once they felt sufficiently gloomy, cheerful or completely unmoved, depending on which clip they saw, the participants were put to the test. Each was presented with a series of washed-out color swatches, so de-saturated they were nearly gray, and asked to identify what color they were. 
   
   While the amused and neutral groups’ ability to discern colors remained unaffected, the Disney-watching crowd had trouble distinguishing swatches on the blue-yellow axis. (The eye’s color encoding matrix ranks light on two axes — from red to green and from blue to yellow — and then sorts it into what we recognize as color.) 
   
   
   
   The image on the left show normal color saturation. The image on the right has been altered by de-saturating the yellow and blue colors in the image. (iStock) 
   
   That only blue-yellow perception was affected, and only among the sad group, is significant. 
   
   Psychologists believe that perception along the blue-yellow axis is linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, Thorstenson told the Association for Psychological Science. Dopamine is the chemical signal that transmits information from neuron to neuron, stimulating the pleasure and reward centers of the brain. It’s responsible for the flush of excitement an addict feels at the sight of a drug and the thrill of an explorer ascending a mountain for the first time, and its absence is associated with apathy, lack of motivation and hopelessness. 
   
   Thorstenson’s study suggests that sadness affects dopamine’s other tasks — among them, transmitting visual information about blue and yellow light. A similar phenomenon has been found in patients with ADHD, who have low dopamine levels and sometimes struggle to perceive the color blue. 
   
   But the study’s findings go beyond color. 
   
   They’re a reminder that our experience of the world is not as immediate and objective as we’d like to believe. It’s easy to assume that cognition — what we think and feel — is a rational response to perception, that we intake information from our senses, process it, and then draw conclusions from that data. 
   
   But some psychologists believe that our understanding of the world happens “top-down” as much as “bottom-up.” In other words, higher-level cognition can determine what and how we perceive. Rather than seeing the world as it really is, our perceptions are colored — literally — by emotions and expectations. 
   
   But this notion is debated — a recent study from Yale argued that many studies purporting to show a “top-down” effect are flawed. 
   
   “The possibility of top-down effects on perception is tremendously exciting,” the study’s author’s wrote. “Accordingly, though, the bar for a suitably compelling top-down effect should be high. Until this high bar is met, it will remain eminently plausible that there are no top-down effects of cognition on perception.” 
   
   Still, findings like Thorstenson’s pop up a lot, and in his conversation with the Association for Psychological Science he was convinced. 
   
   “Our results show that mood and emotion can affect how we see the world around us,” he said. ||||| Are you feeling blue or do you have a case of the mean reds? A new University of Rochester study suggests our ability to perceive color may indeed be flavored by our moods. In two experiments, people who felt sad performed worse on a color accuracy test than those who felt either amused or neutral. 
   
   "Data are beginning to emerge supporting the conventional wisdom that people’s emotions influence how colorful the world looks to them," wrote the researchers in their conclusion. 
   
   If recent data is to be believed, color may influence cognition and behavior, say the researchers. Experiments have shown "exposure to the color red can subsequently impair performance on challenging cognitive tasks, elevate the perceived attractiveness and health of faces, and reduce food intake," they wrote. Exploring in a similar vein, this team of University of Rochester researchers performed two distinct experiments. 
   
   The first began with 129 college students, 83 female, watching either a sad or amusing film clip. After watching the clips, participants were tested for how they were feeling. As expected, those who had watched the sad clip reported more sad feelings, while those who had watched the funny clip experienced greater amusement. Next, the research team tested the participants on color perception accuracy. 
   
   Here, the participants viewed 24 separate color patches created in Adobe Photoshop on a computer screen. For each patch, participants indicated whether the color patch was red, yellow, green, or blue. Participants saw each color patch twice, for a total of 48 random trials. 
   
   The results from this first experiment indicated sad participants performed worse on a color-perception task than amused participants, yet this was only true for colors along the blue-yellow axis. Along the red-green axis, the tested mood states of participants didn't influence perception accuracy. 
   
   Color wheel Michael Hernandez, CC by 2.0 
   
   Because the results could not indicate whether sadness impaired color perception (or whether amusement enhanced it), the researchers decided to run a second experiment. This time, they roughly followed the guidelines of the first experiment, except instead of half the participants seeing an amusing film clip, they watched a neutral clip. Importantly, the researchers converted all the film clips to gray scale "to control for any possible color-fatigue effect that might have been caused by the films' own colors," they noted. 
   
   Following the clips, the participants were tested on both emotional state and color perception. Compared to those who’d watched the neutral clip, sad participants were less accurate in perceiving color along the blue-yellow axis, though equally accurate along the red-green axis. 
   
   "We are speculating that dopamine deficiency might influence [perception of blue-yellow] colors, because past research has shown that perception of these colors is affected in clinical disorders in which dopamine plays a role," Dr. Christopher A. Thorstenson, department of clinical and social sciences in psychology, told Medical Daily in an email. "It is very important to note that we did not measure dopamine, and so cannot say if this is the case." 
   
   Source: Thorstenson CA, Pazda AD, Elliot AJ. Sadness Impairs Color Perception. Psychological Science. 2015.
target: – Got the blues? You probably aren't seeing blues clearly. That's the takeaway from a new study that finds how a person views the color blue may actually depend on mood, reports Medical Daily. Not all colors were affected in the same way. Researchers at the University of Rochester asked 129 college students to watch either a stand-up comedy clip or the scene from The Lion King in which Mufasa dies, then recorded the participants' moods, per the Washington Post. Next, participants took a color accuracy test in which they had to look at 48 color patches that had been desaturated to look nearly gray, then identify whether each was red, yellow, green, or blue. People who were feeling down in the dumps performed worse than those who were amused. In other words, the data supports "the conventional wisdom that people's emotions influence how colorful the world looks to them," the researchers say. However, the sad group performed poorly only when quizzed about colors on what researchers call the blue-yellow axis. They could identify colors on the red-green axis just as well as others—perhaps due to the evolutionary need to see red as a sign of anger, reports Time. The results are "a reminder that our experience of the world is not as immediate and objective as we’d like to believe," observes the Post. Researchers suggest a sad mood messes up the ability of the neuron transmitter dopamine to process information about blue-yellow colors. (This woman sees 100 times more colors than you.)