Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore.
Emotion. 2013 Dec;13(6):1142-9. doi: 10.1037/a0033758. Epub 2013 Sep 16.
Metaphorical expressions linking love and jealousy to sweet, sour, and bitter tastes are common in normal language use and suggest that these emotions may influence perceptual taste judgments. Hence, we investigated whether the phenomenological experiences of love and jealousy are embodied in the taste sensations of sweetness, sourness, and bitterness. Studies 1A and 1B validated that these metaphors are widely endorsed. In three subsequent studies, participants induced to feel love rated a variety of tastants (sweet-sour candy, bitter-sweet chocolates, and distilled water) as sweeter than those who were induced to feel jealous, neutral, or happy. However, those induced to feel jealous did not differ from those induced to feel happy or neutral on bitter and sour ratings. These findings imply that emotions can influence basic perceptual judgments, but metaphors that refer to the body do not necessarily influence perceptual judgments the way they imply. We further suggest that future research in metaphoric social cognition and metaphor theory may benefit from investigating how such metaphors could have originated.
将爱和嫉妒与甜、酸、苦的味觉联系起来的隐喻表达在正常语言使用中很常见，这表明这些情绪可能会影响感知味觉判断。因此，我们研究了爱和嫉妒的现象体验是否体现在甜、酸、苦的味觉感受中。研究 1A 和 1B 验证了这些隐喻得到了广泛的认可。在随后的三项研究中，与那些被诱导产生嫉妒、中性或快乐的参与者相比，被诱导产生爱的参与者认为各种味觉剂（酸甜糖果、苦甜巧克力和蒸馏水）更甜。然而，那些被诱导产生嫉妒的参与者在苦味和酸味评价上与那些被诱导产生快乐的或中性的参与者没有区别。这些发现表明，情绪可以影响基本的感知判断，但提到身体的隐喻并不一定会以它们暗示的方式影响感知判断。我们进一步建议，隐喻社会认知和隐喻理论的未来研究可能受益于研究这些隐喻是如何起源的。
