Davisville, Oct. 6, 2025: When you’re feeling stressed, amber light can help you feel better
Mon, 10/06/2025 - 5:30pm | Bill Buchanan
With all the anxiety loose in the land, this is a timely and practical discovery: Amber lighting reduces your stress.
That’s the gist of recent research at the University of California at Davis that touches on psychology as well as lighting and design, and today on Davisville we talk with two of the people involved in the work: Sreenivasan Meyyappan, an assistant project scientist in the Center for Mind and Brain who ran the relevant experiment at The Color Lab, and Psychology and Neurology Distinguished Prof. Ron Mangun, co-director of the center.
The experiment put volunteers into conditions that evoked everyday stress, then measured the effect of different lighting on their stress. Red, green and blue didn't help, but amber did. We talk about why, as well as the practical value of understanding how lighting affects people. UC Davis' Greg Watry wrote about the research in “The Color Lab Uncovers the Soothing Effect of Lights.”
The image, taken from a UC Davis video about the research, includes Sreenivasan Meyyappan on the left.
