The Mapping And Priming Effects Of Basic Emotions On Daily Taste

Taste is a crucial sensory function for human beings that has both evolutionary significance for survival and the ability to enhance the quality of life.As a result,research on taste has been ongoing.Previous studies have shown that taste is influenced by external factors such as sound and visual stimuli,and that emotions play a mediating role in this process.Studies have found a specific correspondence between emotion and taste,such as positive emotion and sweet,and negative emotion and bitter.However,previous studies have only classified emotions based on positive and negative criteria,and did not consider the arousal of emotions,nor did they subdivide various basic emotions.Based on these reasons,this study focuses on Chinese participants and divides emotions into four categories:happiness,sadness,anger,and fear.It considers five daily taste types:sour,sweet,bitter,salty,and spicy.Four behavioral experiments were conducted to explore the mapping correlation and priming effect between emotions and daily taste.In Experiment 1,text materials with different emotional valence and arousal were used to initiate emotional experiences in participants,forcing the participants to choose their first associated taste within a specified time,so as to explore whether there is a stable mapping pattern between different emotions and tastes.The results showed that certain emotional states had dominance mapping effects:happy(high,low arousal)-sweet;sad(high arousal)-bitter;angry(high arousal)spicy;and fear(high arousal)-bitter.There was no predominance mapping effect between low arousal emotions and taste.In Experiment 2,the emotional words used in Experiment 1 were replaced with emotional pictures,which is more intuitive.The results showed that certain emotional states had dominance mapping effects:happy(high,low arousal)-sweet;sad(high,low arousal)-bitter;angry(high arousal)-spicy;angry(low arousal)-sour;and fear(high arousal)-spicy.There was no predominance mapping effect between low arousal emotions and taste.In Experiment 3,a priming paradigm was used to further investigate the priming effect of basic emotions on daily taste.Emotional materials were the same as in Experiment 1,and taste materials were presented as food pictures.The participants were asked to carefully experience the emotions expressed in the emotional materials and score the taste intensity of the food that followed.The results showed that sadness had a positive priming effect on sour taste,while happiness had a positive priming effect on sweet taste.Anger,fear and sadness had negative priming effects on sweet taste.Happy emotions had a negative priming effect on bitter taste,while sad emotions had a positive priming effect on bitter taste.Anger had a positive priming effect on spiciness.In Experiment 4.emotional words were replaced with emotional pictures,and the priming paradigm of basic emotions on basic taste was observed.The results showed that happy emotions had a positive priming effect on sweet taste,while anger,fear and sadness had a negative priming effect on sweet taste.Sadness had a positive priming effect on bitterness,while anger had a positive priming effect on spiciness.In summary,through the four experiments,it was found that the happy-sweet and sad-bitter associations have a clear mapping relationship and priming effect,and these two pairs of emotion-taste associations are extremely stable,which may have an innate physiological basis endowed by evolution.The stability of the angry-spicy and fear-bitter associations is weak and is easily affected by changes in experimental materials and paradigms.Therefore,their significant associations in some experimental situations may be derived from people’s life experience and obtained through some cognitive mechanisms such as conceptual metaphor.It was also found that positive and negative emotions had simultaneous positive and negative priming effects on sweet and bitter taste.When the participants activated positive emotions such as happiness,not only the perception of sweetness was significantly improved,but also the perception of bitterness was significantly reduced.When participants were activated with negative emotions such as sadness,fear,or anger,not only did the perception of bitterness increase significantly,but also significantly reduced the perception of sweetness.The existence of this synchronous priming effect further indicates that sweet and bitter taste have a core significance in human taste perception,as people regulate sweet and bitter taste through the ups and downs of emotional states,thus affecting people’s psychology and behavior.