Cross-modal relationships between emotional pleasantness and sweetness in taste have been widely examined. Yet the negative effect of sweet taste on the processing of unpleasant information is relatively less discussed, which was explored in this study. Forty healthy undergraduates (Male: 12; Female: 28) were divided into an experimental group and a control group for a lexical task with 15 emotional words and 15 non-word stimuli. Each of the five emotional words indicated a specific emotion including happiness, sadness, and anger. Participants in the experimental group were given 2.5g syrup to taste before the lexical test. All participants had to decide, as fast and accurately as possible, whether each of the stimuli shown on the screen was word or not. Results revealed that the experimental group had lower accuracy with negative emotional words (sad, M: 0.74; angry, M: 0.73) compared to positive ones (M: 0.99), indicating an inhibition effect possibly due to the mismatch between sweet taste and negative content carried by the stimuli. No such difference was observed in the control group. Moreover, due to the ceiling effect (experiment group: M: 0.99; control group: M: 0.96), no facilitation was found in the experimental group in reacting to the positive words, compared with the control group (M: 0.96). Besides the high accuracy, participants in both conditions also reacted the fastest to the positive words than the negative words which aligns with the rationale of the happiness superiority effect.

Authors:
Lap Yan Lo, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong
Cheuk Yan Wan, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong

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Posted by James Alexander Gordon

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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