Even water tastes sweeter when you’re in love, new research finds.
But not every emotion heightens the senses. Jealousy fails to bring out bitter or sour
tastes, despite metaphors that suggest it might, researchers report in the December 2013
issue of the journal Emotion.
That love alters one’s sensory perceptions and jealousy does not is important to
psychologists who study what are called “embodied” metaphors, or linguistic flourishes
people quite literally feel in their bones. For example, studies have shown that people
induced to feel lonely rate the temperature of the room as colder than do their unprimed
counterparts. And the idea that important things have heft plays out physically, too:
When someone believes a book is important, it feels heavier.
But “just because there is a metaphor does not necessarily imply that we will get these
kind of sensations and perception effects,” said study researcher Kai Qin Chan, a doctoral
candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
The taste of love
After seeing previous research on emotional metaphors, like the studies linking loneliness
to coldness and heaviness to importance, Chan and his colleagues wanted to expand the
question.
“We always say, ‘love is sweet,’ ‘honey baby,’ this kind of thing,” Chan told
LiveScience. “We thought, let’s see whether this applies to love.”
Because Chan speaks Mandarin Chinese, he also wondered about jealousy, for which
there is a Mandarin metaphor: chi cu. It literally means, “to ingest vinegar.” There are
similar metaphors in German, Chan said.
After surveying students at the National University of Singapore to be sure that they were
aware of the “love is sweet” and “jealousy is bitter” metaphor, Chan and his colleagues
conducted three experiments with students at the same university.
In the first two studies, researchers asked students to write about an experience either
with romantic love or with jealousy, or about a neutral topic. Next, scientists had the
students taste either Ribena Pastilles (a sweet-and-sour gummy candy) or Meiji Morinaga
bittersweet chocolates.
The candies balanced bitter and sweet and bitter and sour equally, and it required a lot of
taste-testing to find that quality.
“I bought like $80 worth of candies, because I was trying to find a suitable one,” Chan
said. “I was eating candies practically every day.”
