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Current Psychology

, Volume 38, Issue 5, pp 1131–1139 | Cite as

Experiencing Sweet Taste Affects Romantic Semantic Processing

  • Liusheng WangEmail author
  • Qian Chen
Article
First Online:

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.

Keywords

Embodied cognition Romantic advantage effect Sweet taste Semantic processing Metaphor 
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Notes

Funding

This study was funded by Ministry of Education grants (11YJC1900025), and Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Universities of Jiangsu (2017ZDIXM134).

Compliance with Ethical Standards

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Conflict of Interest

Author Liusheng Wang has received research grants from Ministry of Education, and Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Universities of Jiangsu. On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author Liusheng Wang states that there is no conflict of interest.

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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PsychologyNantong UniversityNantong CityThe People’s Republic of China

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