replacing my rose-colored glasses?

A few weeks of blurred vision and difficulty driving at night finally convinced me to have my eyes checked out. My pair of eyeglasses is two years old, so I thought it's a good time to have it replaced. At the shop, the optometrist took me through the paces of the eye exam and confirmed that the grade of my glasses have gone up: both for astigmatism and nearsightedness. Then came my favorite part: choosing the frame! I always get the ultra-thin, multicoated lenses to fit into smaller frames. The new pair is not available in the shop since the lenses have to be ordered. So now I wait. 

While in the shop, I remember the idiom "wearing rose-colored glasses" which means having an optimistic outlook in life. From what I gather from what a friend has told me years back, I'm the girl who has that attitude, who seem to have always lived in a tower, just like Rapunzel probably. He said it like such an attitude was a bad thing, but is it, really? Is choosing to look at the bright side of life or always looking for something positive out of a seemingly hopeless situation supposed to be bad?

Searching for the answer, I bumped into a news feature in PhyOrg.com about a 2009 psychology study from the University of Toronto. The article caught my attention because it was entitled "People who wear rose-colored glasses see more, says study". According to this paper, our moods change the way we perceive the world because of changes in the way the brain, the visual cortex specifically, registers the information.  Based on their observations, the authors posit that people with good moods tend to see more of the world. They tend to see the foreground and the background. While this seems like a good situation, seeing everything also leads to distraction. On the other hand, the authors say that people with bad moods tend to see less of the background and more of the foreground. They are more focused on the task at hand.

Hmm... people who see the world through rose-colored glasses may tend to see patterns, to see integration, to see systems (more on what I'm learning about systems thinking in a future post). Perhaps, they even see organization in chaos. But does this mean that when the glasses are off, people see less of the world? That they see less of their surroundings? That they see more of the minute details?

One thing's for certain. When I was finishing a book chapter edit for a mid-morning deadline, I was in such a bad mood that it surprised the people around me (who are used to my good mood). I'm not sure though if the bad mood resulted from me having to concentrate in the midst of chaos or if the bad mood actually helped me to concentrate. When I'm in a good mood, I take a lot of good colorful photos. And while I do need to concentrate while shooting and editing videos or constructing slide presentations, they turn out prettier when I am in a good mood. I couldn't work on them when I'm grumpy.

So anyway, here are the details of the article (the link leads to the paper's abstract):

Schmitz, T.W., E. de Rosa, and A.K. Anderson. 2009. Opposing influences of affective state valence on visual cortical encoding. Journal of Neuroscience 29(22): 7199-7207.  

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Of course the title had to be more psychology-speak. What was I expecting? I think my nose is going to bleed after all that technical jargon in the title.