#multimodal perception

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Sweet, sweet, sweet victory

By Ryza Sollestre

3…2…1…

And the crowd goes wild! Your favorite team just won and the food never tasted so better! 

Cornell food scientists Noel and Rando examined how emotions from the outcome of college hockey games influenced the perception of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami taste to hedonic responses to food served after.

In their study, the fans were given a salted-caramel pretzel ice cream and lime-lemon sorbet.  The salted-caramel pretzel ice cream was rated more pleasant than the lime-lemon sorbet, which is a mix of a sweet and sour flavor. But when their team won, the lime-lemon sorbet obtained higher hedonic ratings. The positive state enhanced the sweet taste and diminished the sour flavor of the sorbet. So when the team wins, the less-favorable food was enjoyed as well. The opposite also follows. When the home team loses, the sorbet was perceived to be sourer and less sweet, thus low hedonic ratings. The wins or losses of the team did not affect the salty, bitter, and umami taste on the other hand. 

The researchers linked their findings to emotional eating, or overeating to relieve negative emotions. Since less-favorable food becomes more unappealing to our palate when we experience negative emotions, we reach for more hedonistic choices, most are unhealthy food. 

This could be the reason why you reach and crave for a gallon of ice cream, not just when the team you are rooting for loses but also when you are heartbroken, or why you fill your stomach with chips and chocolates in stressful situations.

The study was quite impressive in a way that they make use of a real-life manipulation than being confined in the laboratory. The results could be therefore assumed to parallel real life settings—that a pleasant or unpleasant event could influence our perception. 

So we’ve learned that taste perception is multimodal, meaning the taste of food can be influenced by our sense of sight, hearing, olfaction, and touch. Our experience is not limited to the ingredients used or the quality of food but interestingly, even our emotions could affect the taste of the food we eat. Our taste perception, therefore, is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processing.  This just shows how rich and complex our experience of how we perceive taste or flavor. With this, we should appreciate, savor, and relish the food we eat more, because it’s not just a plate of meal to fill your hungry stomach, but it is surely an experience making use of all your senses.

Cornell University. (2015, July 9). Is defeat sweeter than victory? Researchers reveal the science behind emotional eating. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 13, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709093313.htm Noel, C., & Dando, R. (2015). The effect of emotional state on taste perception [Abstract]. Appetite, 95, 89-95. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2015.06.003