Citation

Thorstenson CA, Pazda AD, Elliot AJ. Psychol. Sci. 2015; 26(11): 1822.

Affiliation

Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797615597672

PMID

26307592

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.

Language: en