Emotionally Directing Visual Sensations: II. Lowering the Threshold for Tinted Percepts

Abstract

In Experiment 1, while ranking the similarity of paired colors, 126 subjects generated feelings of anger and 115 subjects generated feelings of sadness. Paired reds became more similar during anger, and paired blues became more similar during sadness. This initial finding suggests that, from a first-person perspective, the phenomenal world looks redder during anger and bluer during sadness. On each trial in Experiment 2, while trying to discriminate whether a monochromatic face was liminally presented at the top or bottom of a screen, 30 subjects generated either anger or sadness. Better than chance discriminations were obtained only for the localization of red faces during anger and the localization of blue faces during sadness. This latter finding suggests that, from a third-person perspective, the neural threshold for red sensations is lowered by anger, and the neural threshold for blue sensations is lowered by sadness.