Love makes water taste sweeter
Love really is sweet. Both candy and water taste sweeter when people think about love, a new study has found.
However, jealousy fails to bring out bitter or sour tastes, despite metaphors that say it might, researchers said.
The finding that love alters one’s sensory perceptions and jealousy does not is important to psychologists who study “embodied” metaphors, or linguistic flourishes that people quite literally feel in their bones.
“We always say, ‘love is sweet’. We thought, let’s see whether this applies to love,” said researcher Kai Qin Chan, at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Chan and colleagues conducted three experiments on 197 students at the National University of Singapore.
In the first two studies, researchers asked students to write about an experience either with romantic love or with jealousy, or about a neutral topic. Next, scientists had the students taste either sweet-and-sour gummy or bittersweet chocolates. The students ranked the treats’ sweetness, bitterness and sourness. Those who had written about love ranked both candies as sweeter than those who had written about jealousy or a neutral topic.
Writing about jealousy had no effect on rankings of bitterness, researchers found.
The researchers then asked 93 new student-volunteers to sample distilled water. The students were told the water was a new drink and they had to rate its sweetness, bitterness and sourness. Love made the water taste sweeter while jealousy did not affect the water’s taste, the researchers found.
