Experiencing Sweet Taste Affects Romantic Semantic Processing

Abstract

Studies have found that the perception of sweet taste can affect attitudes towards others, and promote the evaluation of intimate relationships. However, the effect of sweetness perception on romantic semantic processing remains unclear. The current study was to investigate whether the experiencing of sweet taste affects the processing of romantic words. Participants were randomly assigned to sweet taste and tasteless conditions, in which they performed a lexical decision task. The results showed the romantic advantage effect that participants in sweet taste condition processed romantic words more rapidly than processing non-romantic words. No gender difference was found on size of romantic advantage effect in sweet taste condition. These results support the embodied cognition hypothesis of romantic semantic processing.