Does sadness impair color perception? Thorstenson et al.’s plan to find out is flawed

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1 School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
2 University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
3 Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States
4 Institut für Psychologie, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1536v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
methodology, color, perception, vision
Copyright
© 2015 Holcombe et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Holcombe AO, Brown NJ, Goodbourn PT, Etz A, Geukes S. 2015. Does sadness impair color perception? Thorstenson et al.’s plan to find out is flawed. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1536v1

Abstract

In their article reporting the results of two experiments, Thorstenson, Pazda, & Elliot (2015a) found evidence that perception of colors on the blue-yellow axis was impaired if the participants had watched a sad movie clip, relative to participants who watched clips designed to induce a happy or neutral mood. Subsequently, these authors retracted their article (Thorstenson, Pazda, & Elliot, 2015b), citing a mistake in their statistical analyses and a problem with the data in one of their experiments. Here, we discuss a number of other methodological problems with Thorstenson et al.’s experimental design, and also demonstrate that the problems with the data go beyond what these authors reported. We conclude that repeating, with minor revision, one of the two experiments, as Thorstenson et al. (2015b) proposed, will not be sufficient to address the problems with this work.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ.