My favorite color is blue. Blue
like Lake Michigan; like Cerulean Blue, the best type of crayon; like the color
of my favorite stuffed animal that I accidentally left on an airplane headed to
Amsterdam when I was little; like the sneakers I wore to pieces as a kid.
But why do we have favorite colors? There are a few good
places to start in considering that question, including the list of
associations I rattled off above. In general, color preference is influenced by
personal experience, cultural upbringing and evolutionary history. Experience
and culture play a significant role in the development of color preferences—for
instance, getting the stomach flu after drinking an orange soda may ruin orange
drinks forever, and while in the U.S. white wedding dresses are the norm, other
cultures assign different values to the color white, such as mourning.
Acknowledging these elements, I’d like to focus on the evolutionary side of
color, and with it a sometimes overlooked emotion: disgust.
An evolutionary perspective is an
interesting one that also leads to some particularly intriguing tangents. From
an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense why humans have developed aversions
to certain groups of colors and attractions to others: survival. There’s a
reason few young kids are interested in drab brown sneakers or grayish-green
crayons. Those colors more often seen as ugly are ones that are associated with
harmful substances such as rot and animal waste, note psychologists Stephen
Palmer and Karen Schloss. On the other hand, more attractive colors such as
bright, clear blues are associated with valuable items or resources, for
instance, clean water.
One factor in determining color
preference is, naturally, color aversion—what colors get weeded out? The
emotion of disgust is an important factor in survival in that it tells us what
to avoid and, as described above, is often linked with color. As researcher and
writer Dr. R. Douglas Fields comments, brown tomato juice seems significantly
less appealing than the same juice dyed red, simply because of a person’s
evolutionary history and learned associations with brown and red objects.
Disgust is an emotion of evasion, featuring a characteristic facial expression—a
wrinkled nose and brow and a turned-down mouth—that mimics the expression
preceding retching. It can also elicit a shudder response or prompt you to
stick out your tongue; all these physiological reactions have the goal of
getting whatever the disgusting trigger may be as far from you as possible.
While disgust, like other emotions,
is likely processed throughout a large network in the brain, rather than in one
specific region, two groups of structures have been identified as being
particularly important in that processing: the insula and the basal ganglia.
The mammalian insular cortex is a small lobe tucked away deep in the Sylvian
fissure, which separates the frontal and parietal lobes from the temporal lobe.
The basal ganglia, on the other hand, are a set of structures around the
thalamus, including the caudate nucleus, putamen, and globus pallidus, that are
largely known for their role in the coordination of movement. Researchers at
the INSERM Institute in France provided evidence for the role of the insula in
the processing of disgust by studying epilepsy patients who had implanted
electrodes in preparation for surgery to relieve their condition. The
researchers noticed that specific neurons in the insulae were activated when
the subjects viewed pictures of disgusted expressions.
Dr. Reiner Sprengelmeyer explored
the role of the basal ganglia in disgust in his examination of studies
performed with patients suffering from Huntington’s disease, which causes
degeneration of basal ganglia structures. Sprengelmeyer explains that several
studies have found that Huntington’s patients have difficulty recognizing
disgusted faces, as well as vocal stimuli expressing disgust. While the results
are not indisputable, he concludes that assessments evaluating the recognition
of emotions could be a useful diagnostic tool.
Psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman at one
point describes emotions as “having evolved through their adaptive value in
dealing with fundamental life tasks,” a wonderfully practical description of
sometimes seemingly arbitrary states of mind. The existence of favorite colors,
and more generally color preference, provides an interesting insight into the
value of disgust and attraction and the mechanisms beneath them. Perhaps my
love of the color blue goes beyond a childhood stuffed animal to the
evolutionary roots underlying our species.
—Kate Oksas
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