Excess Success in “Ray of hope: Hopelessness Increases Preferences for Brighter Lighting”

Dong, Huang, and Zhong (2015) report five successful experiments linking brightness perception with the feeling of hopelessness. They argue that a gloomy future is psychologically represented as darkness, not just metaphorically but as an actual perceptual bias. Based on multiple results, they conclude that people who feel hopeless perceive their environment as darker and therefore prefer brighter lighting than controls. Reversely, dim lighting...