#psych 135

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“What do Love and Jealousy taste like?”

“Look at that beautiful couple. Aren’t they sweet?” “I saw my crush talking to that girl from chem lab. I’m just so bitter that I don’t want to talk about it.”

It seems that taste and emotions have strong ties to each other. Oftentimes, we hear people use expressions of taste to describe what they’re feeling. Likewise, when we feel strong emotions and want to celebrate something, we resort to eating. Couples usually give each other chocolates on Valentine’s Day. But, will the chocolate taste sweeter when you’re feeling blissfully in love?

In a study conducted in Singapore by Chan et al. (2013), they investigated to see whether the feelings (specifically, phenomenological experiences) of love and jealousy are "embodied” in the taste sensations of sweetness, sourness, and bitterness. They wanted to know if the feelings of love and jealousy can influence taste perception.

Metaphorical expressions like “love is sweet” are called bodily metaphors - “linguistic manifestations” of repeated experiential pairings between an “abstract-target domain” like love, and a “concrete sensorimotor-source domain” like sweet. It is known from a previous study that reexperiences of some psychological states can result to specific physical sensations if these sensations were encoded in “modal nodes” during past psychological experiences. As an example, the repeated associations between body warmth and the physical proximity that caregivers give to infants have resulted to an opposite metaphoric expression, “cold and lonely”.

Bodily metaphors for love and jealousy exist. “Love is sweet” and “jealousy is bitter/sour” are commonly used expressions among different cultures as seen in some literary works. In the English language, expressions such as “tasting sour grapes” and “bitter with jealousy” exist. The question is, do these expressions entail embodied effects?

It is possible that the association of sweetness to love may have come early on, from infancy. To infants, breastfeeding is a manifestation of the mother’s love, and we know that breastmilk tastes sweet. “When these experiences of feeding and maternal love become conflated over time, maternal love would acquire the perceptual node of sweetness” (Barsalou, 1999, as cited in Chan et al., 2013). And this might be the reason why sweetness is associated with love. Also, it has been known that maternal love and romantic love shares the same circuit - thus romantic love may also be able to activate sweetness sensations. On the other hand, “evidence of actual correspondence between jealousy and sourness/bitterness, to (the researchers’) knowledge, is nonexistent.” Therefore, they expected that love is embodied in sweetness, and would produce sweetness sensations; while they questioned whether jealousy is likewise embodied in sourness and bitterness.

In their three-part study, we will be discussing the results of Study 2A and 2B, in which they explored whether inducing feelings of love and jealousy would bias taste perceptions in a candy (2A) and chocolate (2B). To give a short background, in study 1, in which they tried to find out if people endorsed metaphors relating love to sweetness, and jealousy to bitterness/sourness, they were able to establish these relationships to be true (people do associate these feelings with these taste sensations). Also, the metaphoric association between love and sweetness was found to be just as strong as that between jealousy and bitterness/sourness.

For Studies 2A and 2B, they used the following: (1) sweet–sour Ribena pastilles) and (2) bitter–sweet Meiji Morinaga chocolates). The pretests showed that the Ribena pastilles were equally sweet and sour, and the Meiji Morinaga chocolates were equally sweet and bitter. To rule out valence effects between the two emotions (love and jealousy), they measured reported happiness, liking of the food presented, and how much participants were willing to pay for the food as indicators of valence. In this study, 95 students (59 women, 36 men) participated.

Feelings of love were induced by making the participants write about a time where they felt romantic love. In the participants assigned to the jealousy condition, they were asked to write about a time where they felt romantic jealousy. Those assigned to the neutral condition were asked to write about landmarks in Singapore. After this, they were made to taste either the pastille candy or the chocolate for one minute. The participants were asked to rate “how sweet, bitter, sour, spicy, and salty the candy/chocolate was from 1 (not [taste] at all) to 7 (very [taste])... Participants also rated how much they liked the candy/chocolate from 1 (I hate it)to 7 (I love it), and how much they would be willing to pay for a pack of it” (Chan et al., 2013).

Analyses showed that participants induced to feel love rated the pastilles sweeter than those induced to feel jealousy. However, participants induced to feel jealousy did not rate the pastilles differently from those in the neutral condition. The taste of sourness did not differ in the three conditions. With the feeling of love producing higher sweetness ratings, it could be attributed to love having “a more positive valence than jealousy and neutral states” (Chan et al., 2013). 

As for the ratings for the chocolate, there was a significant effect of emotion on the sweetness ratings. Participants in the love condition rated the chocolate sweeter than those in the jealousy and neutral conditions. However, the ratings of sweetness between the jealousy and neutral conditions did not differ as well. There was also no significant effect of emotions on sourness ratings. (Chan et al., 2013)

What could account for these love-sweetness findings? It might be because of the neural reward circuitry shared between love experiences and sweetness sensations. “The anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in reward anticipation (Bush et al., 2002), is activated when an individual views pictures of his or her romantic partner (Bartels &Zeki, 2000) and when tasting sugar (De Araujo et al., 2003)” (Chan et al., 2013). Hence, it might be possible that when one feels in love, the “anterior cingulate cortex would activate representations associated with sweetness, thereby eliciting sweetness sensations even without actual sweetness input from an external source” (Chan et al., 2013). As for the null effects of jealousy on bitterness/sourness, the researchers say that there are many possible explanations - (1) their measures for sourness/bitterness were not sensitive enough, or (2) participants were generally bad at judging sourness or bitterness. However, “the null effect of jealousy on sourness or bitterness is consistent with the lack of theoretically viable embodied linkages between jealousy and these tastes.” (Chan et al., 2013)

To sum it up, emotions really can affect our perception of taste sensations. However, in this study, only the linkage between love and sweetness was successfully established. More research on the other emotions and taste sensations can be done to further explore this field. 

Reference:

Chan, K. Q., Tong, E. W., Tan, D. H., & Koh, A. Q. (2013). What do love and jealousy taste like?. Emotion, 13(6), 1142-1149. doi:10.1037/a0033758

Photos:

Romantic Couple Valentines Sweets Jealous Woman

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We Eat (And Drink) With Our Eyes: The Effect of Color on Flavor Perception

Image from rachaeldorothymorgansteindesign.wordpress.com

Of course we do not literally eat or drink with our eyes because that would be impossible and crazy, but many studies have shown the effects of color, which is a visual experience, on flavor perception. It is important that we distinguish between two types of questions that the studies on the multimodal nature of eating have tried to answer. First, does the presence or absence and the intensity of color have an effect on the perception of the intensity of flavor or taste? And does color affect the identification of a particular food or drink’s flavor? To put it simply, we distinguish between color’s effect on the detection and recognition of flavors/tastes. In general, studies have not been able to confirm the role of color on the perception of a flavor’s intensity. Numerous researches, on the other hand, have demonstrated the facilitatory effect of color on the identification of certain flavors.

Image from www.gffoodservice.com.au

Color and Perceived Flavor Identity

In contrast with the inconclusive results with regard to the relationship of color and flavor detection, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that color influences judgments of flavor identity. (e.g., DuBose et al. 1980; Hall 1958; Institute of Food Technologists 1980; Kanig 1955; Levitan et al. 2008; Moir 1936; Sakai 2004; Shankar et al. 2009; Stillman 1993; Zampini et al. 2007, 2008; see also Dolnick 2008; as cited in Spence, Levitan, Shankar, and Zampini, 2010).

For example, in a study by Zellnar et al. in 1990, participants were able to identify odors (which subsequently influences flavor perception) more rapidly when colored appropriately than when colored otherwise. Earlier, DuBose et al. (1980) found that individuals are more likely to misidentify the flavor of a food item when it is colored inappropriately. What is interesting though is that their incorrect responses are influenced by the colors of the drinks themselves. For example, they reported that a cherry-flavored drink had a lemon/lime flavor when colored green. They, however, do not recognize the same flavor when the drink is colored red instead (Spence et al. 2010). Although the results have been fairly consistent with each other, an important limitation is that the participants were not aware of the deception ( i.e. they were not informed that the color of the drinks may or may not be informative of the flavor of the drink). Hence, there is a big possibility that they are responding according to what is expected of them as dictated by the salient visual cues (Spence et al., 2010). For example, a red-colored drink would normally be strawberry or cherry-flavored and so, when the flavor stimulus is ambiguous, an individual would use color to guide their perception of the flavor instead.

Because eating and drinking is not solely a gustatory experience isolated from our other sensory modalities, it is likely that other contextual cues such as whether food/drink is hot or cold, dense or light, etc. would also influence the way we create expectations of what the flavor of that certain food item would be. It is therefore expected that red, which is the color found to have a great influence on the expectations of a food item’s flavor, odor, and taste would have a large effect on flavor and taste perception as well (Spence et al. 2010). Indeed, there is truth to the saying that we eat and drink with our eyes – and apparently, our sense of touch, smell, and hearing as well. Continuing with this line of argument, we may deduce that certain cultural and societal factors that shape our expectations would affect our expectations of what a food item of a certain color’s flavor would be (Spence et al. 2010). For example, in the Philippines, strawberries are locally grown but cherries are not readily available in local markets. It is reasonable to expect then that Filipinos would more likely think that a red-colored food item is strawberry-flavored than cherry-flavored. The cognitive influence of expectancy illustrates the likelihood of a “top-down” processing in flavor perception. In particular, color-induced expectancy effects facilitate flavor identification by directing a participant’s attention to a striking feature of a particular flavor stimulus (e.g., Ashkenazi and Marks 2004; Marks 2002; Marks and Wheeler 1998; Marshall et al. 2006; Oram et al. 1995; as cited in Spence et al. 2010).

Image from www.lifestylefood.com.au

Therefore, these studies do not establish the clear crossmodal perceptual effect of color on flavor perception (Spence et al. 2010). It may be that the effect of color on flavor perception is purely a result of some kind of confirmation bias, i.e. the participants reported the flavor that would confirm their expectations of what a particular food item’s flavor should be based on its color. To eliminate the possibility that participants are operating on a response bias, Stillman (1993) and Zampini et al. (2007), separately conducted studies in which the participants were explicitly informed that there is no relationship between the color and the flavor of the drinks. Both studies confirmed the crossmodal effect of color on flavor perception which suggests that the results of the previous studies are not merely a result of some decisional bias (Spence et al. 2010). This makes it reasonable to conclude that color indeed has a perceptual effect on flavor identification. The challenge for the future now is to establish the physiological basis for such perceptual processes with regard to identifying flavors. This would solidify the crossmodal effects of color on the perceptual identification of flavors.

Image from www.atyourpalate.com

The implications of these studies could help food companies enhance the overall experience of their customers while consuming their products. More importantly, it could aid those who have partially lost their gustatory senses to regain at least some of this ability in order to give them a fuller experience of what they are eating or drinking. In addition, it allows us to appreciate how our sensory modalities could be distinct but not disjointed – that is, although they are separate in the sense that they have their own processing systems and physiological parts, the way we experience the world is integrated into one whole perceptual product that incorporates the information from all the different modalities. Therefore, the phrase “eating with our eyes” may not sound crazy and impossible after all.

Reference:

Spence, C., Levitan, C.A., Shankar, M.U., & Zampini, M. (2010). Does Food Color Influence Taste and Flavor Perception in Humans? Chem. Percept., 3, 68-84. DOI 10.1007/s12078-010-9067-z

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Judging food by its container

The art of food is complex.

Some people may not think much of it, as what goes down is the same no matter what, but there are those who believe that certain preparations are a crucial part of the dining experience. For instance, I have a friend who won't drink wine if it's not in a wine glass. She says it simply doesn't feel right when it's in, for example, a plastic cup or a beer glass. Also, the wine apparently doesn't feel as fancy. Another friend of mine, on the other hand, doesn't like eating packed lunch from a tupperware, favoring his metal lunch kit instead. Metal lunch kit; you know, the one where each container is stacked against the others and held together in place by the handle... Okay, you know what? Let's just refer to it as his metal baunan (that's how he referred to it, anyway). So the thing is, he claims that his lunch tastes better when he eats it from his metal baunan, but it's not because the container somehow gives the food a better taste, like magic. His exact words were "mas ginaganahan akong kumain", or that he's a lot more motivated to eat it. And then there's my own eating-related quirk. Personally, I don't like it when I'm eating dine-in at a food place and the cutlery I've been given is made of plastic. Not only are they small (and, thus, it feels like I'm eating baby portions), it also gives me the impression that what I'm eating is cheap or not that good compared to the same food offered in other restaurants. Additionally, my eating experience becomes all the more unpleasant when the meal is expensive by my standards.

Okay, so what does this mean? Birds of the same picky habits and preferences flock together? Actually, what I've just talked about is an example of sensation transference. Sensation transference occurs when physical attributes of a container, be it plate, cutlery, cups, bottles, etc. are attributed or transferred to the food or drink consumed1. It is when people are consciously aware of the kind of container they are consuming food or drink from, which then produces a certain effect involving their perception of the food or drink, or their experience of eating or drinking.

Remember those articles that showcased creative packaging of certain food and drinks? Did you perhaps developed inclinations to try that product out or to simply see it for yourself just because of the ingenuity, innovativeness, or some other quality of the packaging that moved you or piqued your interest? (You didn't? What a liar.) Because of such effects, a lot of research, especially consumer and food-related research, is actually looking into it. The resulting investigations, specifically regarding the effect of the physical attributes of containers towards perception and consumption experience, had produced varying results, mostly dependent on the kind of foodstuff the attributes were tested against.

For instance, it was found that orange plastic cups with white interiors enhanced people's perception of the chocolate flavor of hot chocolate2. The same study also found  that dark-cream colored cups had the same effect, in addition to enhancing perceived sweetness and aroma of the drink. Elsewhere, Van Doorn, Wuillemin, & Spence3 found that compared to transparent glass mugs, white ceramic mugs enhanced the perceived taste intensity and bitterness of coffee. Both studies suggest that the white background (interior) of the cups may have influenced the perceived brownness of the hot chocolate and coffee, and that influenced people's perception and evaluation of the drinks. Indeed, even when it comes to other food receptacles such as cutlery and plates, it was found that color, when it is in contrast with the color of a particular food or drink, appears to enhance the perceived taste of food.1,4

What about water? Water is a tasteless drink, so what happens when sensation transference occurs regarding this particular beverage? 

In a series of experiments, Aradhna Krishna from the University of Michigan and Maureen Morrin from Rutgers University showed that many people do indeed judge a drink by its container, even flavorless drinks such as water. Specifically, they investigated how the firmness of the cup affected people's evaluations of the drink contained within.5

There were four experiments, all of which basically involved the same mineral water being contained within a flimsy cup and a cup of firmer material. These cups looked the same, differing only in the firmness of the material. The participants then evaluated the quality of the water: (1) when they were touching and holding the cups while blindfolded, (2) when they were not blindfolded but were asked not to touch the cups, (3) when they were able to see and touch them, and (4) when they were simply given written descriptions of the cups.

Krishna and Morrin’s study found out that when water was served in flimsy, plastic cups, people actually perceived the water as being of higher quality based on the written description and from looking at the cups, that is, when they were not able to touch or hold either cup, compared to when they were allowed to hold them. However, when people actually held the cups, they rated the quality of the water in the flimsy cups as having a lower quality than those in the firm cups (note that both cups contain the same kind of water). The most interesting finding, however, was that strong autotelics, that is, people who like to touch things before they buy them, were the least influenced from having physical contact with the cups. In the study's taste test of the same mineral water from both a flimsy and a firm cup, it was actually the low autotelics (those who weren't particularly inclined to touch products) who gave the most negative evaluations of the taste of the water in the flimsy cup.

What does this mean? The researchers believed that strong autotelics, compared to low autotelics, enjoy touching objects and thus are inclined to touch them more, and as a result of which they are more consciously aware of the potential effect the qualities of the container of a product regarding evaluation of the actual product itself. Because of this, high autotelics are more capable of adjusting their judgment regarding such matters. 

Looking at the results more broadly, however, we can see that the feel of the cup really does affect our perception of the drink it holds. This is most relevant to those in the food industry, especially the establishments who sell drinks in disposable containers, such as fastfood restaurants and coffee shops. When the drink is truly great yet the feel of the material isn’t as good, there would be a negative impact on customers’ perception of the beverage’s taste and quality. And that wouldn’t be too good for business, now, would it?

Article by CK Hermosa

1Spence, C., Harrar, V., & Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (2012). Assessing the impact of the tableware and other contextual variables on multisensory flavour perception. Flavour, 1, 7-19. Retrieved from http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-1-7.pdf

2 Piqueras-Fiszman, B. & Spence, C. (2012). The weight of the container influences expected satiety, perceived density, and subsequent expected fullness. Appetite, 58, 559–562.

3Van Doorn, G. H., Wuillemin, D., & Spence, C. (2014). Does the color of the mug influence the taste of the coffee? Flavour, 3(10). Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2044-7248-3-10

4Harrar, V. & Spence, C. (2013). The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it. Flavour, 2(21). Retrieved from http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-2-21.pdf

5Krishna A. & Morrin, M. (2008). Does touch affect taste? The perceptual transfer of product container haptic cues.  Journal of Consumer Research, 34, 807–818.

Cup of water [Online image]. Retrieved November 2, 2015 from cleanwateraction.org

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“DANS LE NOIR”

by Andrea Espino

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Music vs Noise

Musical expertise provides you an advantage beyond being more talented than the average person. It can actually help with learning.

--

Children With Learning Disabilities

Some like Snowling (1981, 2001) attribute it to impairment in their phonological processing--the ability to store, manipulate, and use speech sounds. Others (Merzenich et al., 1996; Tallal, 1980; Tallal, Stark, & Mellits, 1985) say it’s sensory processing, especially the ability to process fast temporal events. Ultimately, there is consensus that for a heterogeneous disorder, individual-specific solutions are necessary (Katzir, 2009; Murphy & Pollatsek, 1994).

Deficit in noise-exclusion i.e., the ability to exclude noise during sensory or cognitive processing (Sperling, Lu, Manis, & Seidenberg, 2005) also seems to be a common problem among children with difficulties in learning.

What role does music play in all this?

Music experience = neuroplasticity to musical sounds = increased sensitivity to musical sounds. This is not surprising, and in fact is backed up by a LOT of studies (Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2005; Koelsch, Schroger, & Tervaniemi, 1999; Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, & Kraus, 2007; Pantev et al., 1998; Pantev, Roberts, Schulz, Engelien, & Ross, 2001; Tervaniemi, Rytkonen, Schroger, Ilmoniemi, & Naatanen, 2001).

What’s surprising is the link between musical experience and processing of speech stimuli (Musacchia et al., 2007; Schon, Magne, & Besson, 2004; Wong, Skoe, Russo, Dees, & Kraus, 2007). In particular, it improves the following:

verbal working memory (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998; Forgeard, Winner, Norton, & Schlaug, 2008)

processing of prosody and linguistic features in speech (Bidelman, Gandour, & Krishnan, in press; Chandrasekaran, Krishnan, & Gandour, 2009; Wong et al., 2007), phonological skills (Forgeard, Schlaug, et al., 2008)

processing emotion in speech (Strait, Kraus, Skoe,& Ashley, 2009)

working memory (Parbery-Clark, Skoe, Lam, et al., 2009)

auditory attention (Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010)

auditory stream segregation (Beauvois & Meddis, 1997).

Music & Language

These domains share many features, the most direct being that both exploit changes in pitch patterns to convey information. For music, pitch contours and intervals communicate melodies and tone centers. Pitch patterns in speech convey prosodic information e.g. information about the speaker’s intention, emotion, etc. Musicians show enhanced processing of prosodic and linguistic pitch.

Music & Memory

Musicians recalled more words compared to nonmusicians in a list learning task (Chan et al., 1998). Children who received instrumental music training also showed enhanced vocabulary (Forgeard,Winner, et al., 2008). Musical discrimination skills significantly predicted phonological and reading skills (Forgeard, Schlaug, et al., 2008).

Noise-Exclusion

Musicians, as a consequence of training that requires consistent practice, online manipulation, and monitoring of their instrument, are experts in extracting relevant signals from the complex soundscape.

To escape the temptation of sleeping or distraction of many other things within one’s home, a growing habit of students, especially those in college is to study in coffee shops. Inevitably, in such places, background noise would exist. This is where noise exclusion comes in. And for ~musical experts~ it comes easier. The differences in spectral representation between musicians and nonmusicians are large, suggesting that musical experience protects against the debilitating effects of background noise (Parbery-Clark, Skoe, et al., 2009).

So investing time and effort to learn at least one instrument can benefit you not only in terms of being a tad more impressive talent-wise but also practically: help with language discrimination, memory, and noise-exclusion. Music is key.

Post by Jem Cabanlong

Article: Chandrasekaran, B., & Kraus, N. (2010). Music, noise-exclusion, and learning. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bharath_Chandrasekaran/publication/249978402_Music_Noise-Exclusion_and_Learning/links/53f9fbe00cf27c365ceae10b.pdf.