Happy People Identify Colors More Accurately

You might be a "colour" person, but if you have high levels of dopamine in your body, you can identify colours better, according to a new scientific study.

This is called the happy hormone. Dopamine, a compound in the human body, helps to manage movements as well as emotional responses, and is linked with feelings of happiness.

It was in a 2013 paper  led by Lea Hulka of the University of Zürich that the "blue-yellow vision impairment" was commonly found among cocaine users, which was linked to "drug-induced changes in retinal dopamine neurotransmission."

The was supported in August 25 by another publication.

In a research led by psychology researcher Christopher Thorstenson of the University of Rochester, it was concluded that sadder people were less accurate in locating colors on the Blue-Yellow Axis.

The first test showed 127 participants divided into two, with one group forced to watch a "sad animated clip" and another exhibiting a stand-up comedy. All the members of the group were asked to locate the colors in 48 "consecutive, desaturated color swatches".

Picking out the shades and tones along the blue-yellow axis, the group watching the glum clip exhibited lower scores than the other one that savoured the happy flick. "There was no significant difference in the groups' performance for sorting colors along the red-green axis," CNET reported.

In yet another test on 130 participants that were put into two groups, the first one watched a sad clip while the other one looked at a neutral video. It was noticed that the first group was less accurate in identifying colors along the blue-yellow axis than the neutral group.

Again, "there was no difference in the two group's performance in recognizing colors along the red-green axis," according to hngn.