Sweet taste brings happiness, but happiness does not taste sweet: the unidirectionality of taste-emotion metaphoric association

ABSTRACT

According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts can be understood in terms of concrete concepts, but not vice versa, suggesting the unidirectionality of metaphoric association. In the current four experiments (valid N = 541), we examined the directionality of taste-emotion metaphoric association. To test the taste-to-emotion metaphoric association, we had participants rate on pleasantness after consuming a chocolate or rate their change in emotion using different scales before and after consuming a chocolate. To examine the emotion-to-taste metaphoric association, we induced participants’ emotion via watching film clips or retrieving autobiographical memory and asked them to rate the sweetness and bitterness after consuming a chocolate. With a more optimal design, results showed that sweet chocolates increased positive emotion and reduced negative emotion, whereas bitter chocolates increased negative emotion and reduced positive emotion. In contrast, induced emotion did not influence participants’ perception of chocolate taste. Other possible mechanisms are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Taste
• emotion
• directionality
• conceptual metaphor
• chocolate

Acknowledgements

We thank Lee Gilman and Karin Coifman for providing link for film clips used in Experiment 3 and additional valence rating information for the film clips and Brian Meier for providing mean and standard deviation information of Meier et al.’s (2017) experiments for our sample size estimation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

YZ and CT contributed to the study design. YZ performed the data collection and analyses. YZ and CT wrote the paper. Both authors have approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/76pdt.