Does sadness impair color perception? Thorstenson et al.’s plan to find out is flawed
- 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
- 2015. Does sadness impair color perception? Thorstenson et al.’s plan to find out is flawed. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1536v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1536v1
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.
