Feeling sad can literally colour your view of the world, researchers say

“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 colours, as though we live in Dorothy’s Kansas. But a good mood can bring those colours back into the world, just like a tornado trip to Oz.

“We were already deeply familiar with how often people use colour terms to describe common phenomena, such as 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 colours 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 at the Uni- versity of Rochester in New York watched the two-minute scene from The Lion King, in which Mufasa is killed. The clip is scientifically proven to induce irresistible sadness.

Other participants were shown a clip from a standup comedy routine or a neutral screen saver. Once they felt sufficiently gloomy, cheerful or completely unmoved, the participants were presented with a series of washed-out colour swatches and asked to identify the colours.

While the amused and neutral groups’ ability to discern colours re- mained unaffected, the Disney-watching crowd had trouble distinguishing swatches on the blue-yellow axis. 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’s absence is associated with apathy, lack of motivation and hopelessness. Thorstenson’s study suggests that sadness affects dopa- mine’s ability to transmit 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 colour blue.

But the study’s findings go beyond colour. They are 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 is a rational response to perception, that we intake information from our senses, process it and then draw conclusions from that data.