Sensation & Perception - Essay Example

Red, green, and blue are some of my favorite colors because they are pleasant to my senses; however, the color blue is particularly meaningful to me, or I ‘perceive’ this color as special from the rest because every time I am wearing blue I usually get what I wanted. Call it luck, but it is true for me. According to some psychologists, many people like the colors red, green, and blue because we have special ‘cones’ that immediately recognize light waves for these three colors (Nicholas, 2009).

But different people perceive different colors differently, because of what they call ‘perceptual expectancy’ (Weiner, 2003). I define this as perception that is based on our experiences and biological tendencies. But what interests me most with regard to sensation and perception is the concept of ‘pain’. All of us experience pain, but how pain is felt differs from person to person. They call it ‘pain threshold’ (Weiner, 2003). If you have a low pain threshold you can easily feel pain, whereas those who have a high pain threshold are quite resistant to several types of pain.

Our senses determine what is painful and what is not. But what interests me is how perception can change our pain threshold. According to psychologists, there are three perception-based factors that can alter how we feel pain, namely, expectations, personality, and mood (Nicholas, 2009). If you expect something to hurt, like being pricked by a needle, then it will definitely hurt. If you have a negative kind of personality (e.g. pessimistic), then you feel pain even more. And if you have a bad mood, like being angry, then your experience of pain will increase.

I will try to briefly examine these concepts in my second blog