Lights Out: The Effects of Brightness on Judging Morally Ambiguous Behavior

Just this passed semester, your blog team had conducted a research based on a question posed Banerjee, Chatterjee, and Sinha (2012) regarding the association of brightness and darkness to moral judgment.

Given that light and dark appear to be linked to moral behavior, can ambient light affect the perception and evaluation of morally ambiguous behaviors?

 Their original study showed that when participants were asked to recall a good deed they have done in the past, they judged the room they were in to be brighter while participants who were asked to recall a morally wrong behavior in the past, judged the room to be darker (Banerjee, et. al., 2012).

Our research aimed to find out whether the brightness of the room affected the participants' judgments of a morally ambiguous behavior, and guess what? It did, and what more, participants who were in the bright condition gave softer, kinder forms of punishment and were more inclined to give a reward to the doer of the morally ambiguous behavior while participants in the dark condition gave harsher, stricter punishments and none were inclined to give any form of reward to the doer of the ambiguous behavior.

Light and dark have always been connected with good and evil. In media, villains, demons and evil are always depicted in dark colors while protagonists, angels and goodness are depicted in a brighter more vibrant manner.

Can you tell which ones are the angels of Paradiso and which ones are the infernal demons of Inferno from the pictures on the left? The pictures come from a game called Bayonetta and in this game, Paradise and angels are depicted in bright hues of white and gold while demons and infernal representations are depicted in hues of black, purple and red. In the Holy Bible, Jesus is known as the "Light of the world" while Lucifer is known as the "Prince of darkness" who disguises himself as an "Angel of light" to trick the people of the world. When I tell you to imagine heaven, do you imagine a dark and dim place or a bright, well-lit place?

Yin (black) and Yang (white): Respectively, negative and positive energies

Depression: Is it all in the mind?

Claude Monet's painting of his dying wife Camille

Clinical depression is something that isn't that much explored here in the Philippines. Sometimes, people just use the term colloquially saying they are "depressed" with a meaning that they are sad or heartbroken or feeling under the weather. Maybe you have used the term to refer to those moods as well. However, because of this, people who are clinically depressed almost always end up getting judged to be just "dramatic" or being "irresponsible" when they are experiencing the bouts of depression. Sometimes, we just assume it is temporary and tell them to cheer up or worse, tell them that there are worse things in life and they should think of their problem in comparison to others. I've recently witnessed three people who were/are depressed and it isn't something they can just snap out of.

Depressed people often report seeing the world as a dull, grey world. You can often see these dark, somber colors being used by artists in their works and paintings depicting sadness and depression. It isn't actually just an artistic representation. Studies showed that there are biological reasoning behind these phenomena.

Depression actually affects your visual perception by affecting cognitive functioning. Bubl and his coworkers (2010) found that people who were depressed had an impaired contrast perception as opposed to healthy individuals. The study showed that the depressed participants were less able to detect contrast differences in black and white checkerboard patterns shown to them. This was shown through the electrical recordings of their retinal activities measured through electrodes attached near the participants' eyes. The more severe the depression, the less were the electrical responses of their retina to contrasts. Antidepressants and other medications didn't make a difference on the results of the study.

This study is actually very helpful in the future assessment of depression among individuals. These electrical responses provide psychiatrists with more objective means of measurement for depression and its severity among those affected with it. Having this dulled contrast perception can prolong the depressive state of the individual and can feed into the depressed person's mood.

References:

Bubl E., Kern, E., Ebert, D., Bach, M., and Tebartz van Elst, L. (2010). Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased. Retrieved November 2012 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/34591834/Seeing-Gray-When-Feeling-Blue-Depression-Can-Be-Measured-in-the-Eye-of-the-Diseased

Larance, J. (2010). Depression really does make everything look grey. In The Independent. Retrieved November 2012 from http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/depression-really-does-make-everything-look-grey-2031296.html