Feeling gloomy does make your world turn gray.
According to a new study, sadness can change our visual perception. As published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found have found an explanation behind using colors as metaphors in describing emotions such as having a "gray day" or "feeling blue".
"It was interesting that we have so many metaphors that link emotion and color perception," said University of Rochester psychology researcher Christopher Thorstenson, the study's lead author in an email to The Huffington Post. "We were curious whether there really was a link between sadness and how people see color."
For the study, 127 undergraduates were grouped to watch either a funny or sad video. The students were then made to identify each of the 48 color swatches that were desaturated into almost shades of gray as yellow, red, green or blue.
Researchers found out that those who watched the sad video were less likely to identify colors accurately than those who watched the funny clip. As concluded, those who had seen the sad clip perceived less of the brighter colors.
Various studies about mood and perception have been conducted explaining how emotions affect neural processes involving visual perception. According to a previous research, being motivated like trying to reach the finish line makes people perceive the object bigger than its actual size.
Another study concluded that the feeling of fear changes our visual perception by making us see negative facial expressions more threatening than they really are.
According to psychologists, the brain's perceptual and emotional systems engage in a dynamic play rather than being entirely distinct from each other as previously believed.
"Psychologists have tacitly viewed perception, cognition, emotion, and other basic processes as separable phenomena to be studied in isolation," according to psychologists Jonathan Zadra and Gerald Clore, who wrote a review of studies on emotion and perception in 2011. "Increasingly, however, we are coming to see relevant areas of the brain and the processes they support as highly interactive."
