Do Some People Literally See Red When They're Angry?

A couple of years ago, Russ Hurlburt and I gave a woman a random beeper to carry around for six days, spread out over a month or two. When the beep went off, she was to note whatever her "inner experience" was at the last undisturbed moment prior to the beep. After collecting several samples, she came into Russ's lab and we jointly interviewed her about those sampled experiences -- Russ from the point of view of several decades as a practitioner of this method of learning about people's stream of conscious experience, I as a pessimist about reports of one's conscious experience.

I found these interviews immensely useful in thinking about the issues involved in both the epistemology and the nature of conscious experience. Russ and I are currently working on a book manuscript based on these interviews.

To give you a flavor of the kinds of issues that arise, the woman we interviewed claimed that immediately prior to one of the beeps she experienced a "rosy-yellow glow" associated with the humor of a thought she was having. She said that she literally experienced this color at the sampled moment, and she had a sense that this was not at all atypical of her emotional experience.

Now, to me, this report was surprising. Some people report synaesthesia of, say, color with number -- claiming literally to see a particular color when they view or think about a particular number (e.g., green with 4) -- but this is rather rare, and I hadn't heard much discussion of literal color experiences attending emotion. However, Russ reminded me that people often claim to "see red" when they're angry. Indeed, he has had people claim to literally "see red" or feel "blue" when the beeper catches them in one of those moods. He finds such reports credible.

So: Do some people literally "see red" when they're angry? If you're familiar with my pessimism about experiential reports, you'll know that I'm very wary about such claims. So I wonder if there's some way to verify or disprove them, without relying entirely on subjective report. Suggestions welcomed!

One thing that occurred to me was that if some people literally see red when they're angry, there may be some basic physiological reason for that. If so, it may be a cross-cultural phenomenon, and we might see traces of the red-anger association in other languages. So I informally polled some acquaintances whose native tongue was not English. The poll did not support this hypothesis. In German, I'm told, "rotsehen" (lit. to see red) does mean to be enraged, but German is so linguistically close there may be a common etymological relationship to the English phrase. In no other language of the ten or so polled could I find evidence of an association between red and anger.

Of course, it may be that if some people literally see red when they're angry, that association is culturally derived. Then the lack of cross-cultural corroboration is irrelevant.