Taste Metaphors Ground Emotion Concepts Through the Shared Attribute of Valence

Naturalistic food categories are driven by subjective estimates rather than objective measures of food qualities

Food-related studies often categorize foods using criteria such as fat and sugar content (e.g., high-fat, high-sugar foods; low-fat, low-sugar foods), and use these categorizations for further analyses. While these criteria are relevant to nutritional health, it is unclear whether they agree with the ways in which we typically group foods. Do these objective categories correspond to our subjective sense? To address this question, we recruited a group of 487 online participants to perform a triplet comparison task involving implicit object similarity judgements on images of 36 foods, which varied in their levels of fat and sugar. We also acquired subjective ratings of other food properties from another set of 369 online participants. Data from the online triplet task was used to generate a similarity matrix of these 36 foods. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of this matrix identified that the strongest determinant of food similarity (the first PC) was most highly related to participants' judgements of how processed the foods were, while the second component was most related to estimates of sugar and fat content. K-means clustering analysis revealed five emergent food groupings along these PC axes: sweets, fats, starches, fruits, and vegetables. Our results suggest that naturalistic categorizations of food are driven primarily by knowledge of the origin of foods (i.e., grown or manufactured), rather than by their sensory or macronutrient properties. These differences should be considered and explored when developing methods for scientific food studies.

Spice up the moment: The influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspectives on time

Embodied cognition contends that sensorimotor experiences undergird cognitive processes. Three embodied cross-domain metaphorical mappings constitute quintessential illustrations: spatial navigation and orientation underpin the conceptualization of time and emotion and gustatory sensation underlies the formulation of emotion. Threading together these strands of insights, the present research consisted of three studies explored the potential influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspectives on time. The results revealed a positive correlation between spicy taste and the ego-moving metaphor for time such that individuals who enjoyed spicy taste (Study 1) and who consumed spicy (vs. salty) snack (Study 2) exhibited a predilection for the ego-moving perspective when cognizing a temporally ambiguous event. Because both spicy taste and the ego-moving metaphor are associated with anger and approach motivation, the latter two were postulated to be related to the novel taste-time relationship. Corroborative evidence for the hypothesis was found, which indicated that spicy (vs. salty) intake elicited significantly stronger anger toward and significantly greater approach-motivated perception of a rescheduled temporal event (Study 3). Taken together, the current findings demonstrate that spicy taste may play a role in people's perspectives on the movement of events in time and highlight the involved embodied interrelation between language, emotion, and cognition.

Effects of environmental colours in virtual reality: Physiological arousal affected by lightness and hue

It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation. We assessed participants' physiological responses (i.e. arousal) with heart rate and skin conductance measures, and their self-reported levels of valence and arousal in response to the coloured environments. The results revealed physiological effects of lightness and hue. When compared with the baseline measures, heart rate increased, and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark than the medium lightness rooms. Both measures signalled higher arousal in the darker room, irrespective of hue. Also, when compared with the baseline measures, skin conductance increased more in the red than the blue rooms, again signalling higher arousal in the red condition. The difference between the red and the blue conditions was detectable only on some saturation and lightness combinations. We conclude that being immersed in environments of different colours can change physiological arousal. However, not all changes are driven by hue and not all the effects are measurable on all physiological parameters.