Colour Perception Characteristics of Women in Menopause

Female hormones affect perception, cognition and mental condition of women in the menstrual cycle and menopause. However, how menopause affects colour perception, and whether mental condition, especially depression, is related to colour perception remain unclear. Here, we investigated the influences of menopause on colour perception, recording the response times to three types of face and scrambled face stimuli: happy, neutral and sad, with three colours: red, yellow and blue. We predicted that colour perception of participants would be interfered with and delayed by emotional facial expression, as emotional facial expressions are connected with specific colours. We also examined depression states in women using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D Scale) to understand the relationship between colour perception and depression. Fifty-nine female participants participated in the experiments. We analysed the data of 23 pre-menopausal and 20 post-menopausal participants. The results showed that the premenopausal women reacted to all stimuli faster than the postmenopausal women, and the post-menopausal women reacted to only blue significantly more slowly than to the other colours. Colour perception had no clear association with reaction time to emotional facial expression or with depression. The results suggest that menopause could influence colour perception of women as one of the possible factors, as well as aging, with such influence, and imply that the perceptual differences of blue between pre- and post-menopausal women result from a deficit in short wavelength sensitivity cones possibly caused by menopause-associated hormonal changes.