14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada say that, according to their investigations into the matter at hand, bright light has the ability to intensify human emotions.
More precisely, they argue that, as shown by several experiments that they carried out, people experiencing positive emotions are likely to perceive them as being more powerful when exposed to bright light.
On the other hand, people experiencing negative emotions have high chances to switch to having an even gloomier take on life should they find themselves in a brightly lit environment.
“On sunny days people are more optimistic about the stock market, report higher wellbeing and are more helpful while extended exposure to dark, gloomy days can result in seasonal affective disorder,” Alison Jing Xu explains.
“Contrary to these results, we found that on sunny days depression-prone people actually become more depressed,” the researcher goes on to detail, as cited by Science Daily.
Alison Jing Xu believes that the fact that bright light influences the intensity of human emotions might at least partly explain why it is that, during late spring and summer, when sunshine is abundant, suicide rates reach their highest level.
In a paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the University of Toronto Scarborough researchers explain that, in order to investigate how light intensity influences mood, they asked a group of volunteers to rate several things while exposed to various lighting conditions.
The things that these volunteers had to rate were as follows: the spiciness of chicken wing sauce, the aggressiveness of a fictional character, how attractive someone was, their feelings about specific words, and the taste of two juices.
It was thus discovered that, under bright light, the volunteers preferred spicier chicken wing sauce, said that the fictional character was more aggressive, found the women more attractive, felt better about positive words and worse about negative ones, and favored the good juice.
“Bright light intensifies the initial emotional reaction we have to different kinds of stimulus including products and people,” Alison Jing Xu sums up the findings of this investigation.