Scientifically demonstrate the common phenomenon of mankind, the world seems gray if it feels blue

The image associated with color varies according to language and culture, for example, a culture expressing "environmentally friendly" as "green" and a culture expressed as "blue", a culture linking "black" to "funeral" There is a culture that connects "white", a culture which calls pornographic movies "pink movies" and a culture called "blue film".

However, it is worldwide that "depression" and "despair" are drawn in dark colors in visual arts such as paintings and photographs regardless of languages, cultures, times and authors. When it is melancholic "The world looks gray" "Everything looks faded" is not just a poetic expression, but in reality the human eye is depressedcontrastIt seems that you are watching the "gray world" where the sensitivity to the difference between the two is lowered, the difference in brightness and darkness in the eyes is reduced and the intermediate color has increased.

Details are as below.Why does everything look gray when you feel blue?

Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased

If someone who feels depression or anxiety chooses a color to express their own mood from the color chartOften you choose grayIt seems that it has already been clarified in the experiment. In Japanese there are expressions "dark mood" and "bright mood", but "depression" and "gray" are linked regardless of culture and language, but the world actually looks gray in the eyes of a depressed person It may be based on the physiological phenomenon of.

University of FreiburgDr. Ludger Tebartz van Elst and colleagues and others have found that patients with depression are less susceptible to color contrast in previous studies.

"High contrast" means that the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black is large. The contrast of the GIGAZINE logo in the image below is the highest on the upper left and the lowest on the lower right, but if the sensitivity to contrast is low, healthy people will not be able to read characters even with contrast that can distinguish the difference in color .


In other words, it is insensitive to the difference between the dark and bright parts when it is depressed, so in extreme terms "white and black will all look like gray". When it is healthy, white and black which look like this ... ....


When it is depressed it may look like this with no such difference.


In order to objectively measure the difference between depressed patients and healthy people with subjective cognition of "how this color is visible to that person"Biological PsychiatryIn the latest research published in the magazine, Dr. Van Elst et al.Electroretinogram(PERG: Pattern Electroretinogram) was used.

In the experimentMajor depressive disorderOf the 40 patients diagnosed with depression (20 patients undergoing medication treatment, 20 patients not receiving medication) and 40 healthy adults in the control group as subjects, the difference between depressed patients and healthy people Differences in visual contrast sensitivity were analyzed by PERG measurement of both eyes.

As a result, despite being treated with medication, depressed patients had dramatically lower visual contrast sensitivity than healthy people. In addition, as the symptoms of depression were heavier, the reaction of the retina was lower, and there was also a significant correlation between the degree of depression and the contrast sensitivity.

Is the beach in the midsummer on a sunny day also seemingly dull sight to severe depressed patients ...?


The difference in contrast sensitivity between healthy and depressed patients is that it is accurate whether the measurement results are from depressed patients or healthy people in most cases even if one electrophysiological data of the measurement results is taken out It is enough to judge. Recipient operation characteristic analysis (ROC analysisOkay.Specificity(The probability that the test result will be negative in the case of not being sick) is 92.5%sensitivity(The probability that the test result will be positive in case of illness) was 77.5%, PERG may be a new objective indicator in depression diagnosis which depends on patient's subjectivity. It is not expected.