An intriguing paper thatcreated headlinesthree months ago has been withdrawn , following criticisms of its methodology . The good news is that not only is science functioning as it should , but that people with depression at least may not be deprived of the beauties of colour .
In August Rochester University’sChristopher Thorstensonpublisheda paper in Psychological Sciencetitled Sadness Impairs Color Perception . Thorstenson and two co - authors reported that when a group of masses were shown sad film magazine , their capacity to tell apart dingy from lily-livered in a subsequent exam was thin out , but they did not experience the same trouble with green and crimson . Moreover , control groups shown either peculiar or neutral clips were unaffected .
IFLScience was barely alone in witness this research worth report . Numerousotherpopular scienceandgeneral intelligence sitesdid too , encouraged by thetraditional associationof the color blue devil and sadness . While the research miss obvious short term applications , ascription to dopamine ’s role in spicy sensing suggest new angle for neurochemistry research .
Now , however , the author havepublished a retractionin recognition of two problemsothers point outafter issue .
The author acknowledge that they failed to do a mental testing for statistical significance between the response on the blue - yellow and cherry-red - fleeceable bloc . Without this , they tell : “ We should not have reason that our pattern of findings ruled out a motivational explanation . ” In other dustup , the results might be a occasion of participant who watch the sorry clipping not try on their better , because life just did n’t seem that fun at the time .
Furthermore some of the participants gave the same response to every blue - yellow test . Whether they were try out or not , these event should have been removed from the sample distribution . Taking out the datum from this group did n’t change the trial ’s results , but did leave a suspiciously belittled sampling size .
Nothing in the job Thorstenson and his co - author recognise point that their original claims were wrong , but more enquiry is need before they can be stated with any trust .
“ Given these two job , we are retracting this clause from the journal , ” the authors put forward in the retraction . “ We will conduct a revised experimentation 2 that more directly tests the motivational rendering and improves the assessment of [ blue - yellow ] accuracy … We remain sure-footed in the proposal that sadness spoil semblance perception , but would care to gain clearer evidence before making this conclusion in a daybook the gauge of Psychological Science . ”
The retraction is an example of how science should knead . In an ideal cosmos problems such as this would be identified through pre - publication compeer review , but that is not always run to materialise . Rather than dependably holding to their results , the authors have responsibly acknowledged the problem and are doing further research .
However , in the light of a review finding that most psychological science studiescan’t be regurgitate , the latest withdrawal may add to questions as to whether psychology journals are less rigorous in their peer reassessment than other fields of science .
