# Psychological Effects of Sweet Taste and Sweet Taste Preference
## 2 Love Is Sweet: Sweet Taste and Romantic Mindsets  
When we perceive the world around us, our minds have to form coherent images of this world, so that we could communicate successfully with our conspecifics. Although our brains seem to be very good at this task, recent research demonstrates that we are not always entirely independent in our social perceptions and decisions. For example, bodily sensations coming from tactile, olfactory, visual, or gustatory modalities seem to influence (or prime) our social perceptions [1; 6]. How do these sensory experiences affect our thinking? According to the conceptual metaphor theory, language seems to be crucial here. This theory argues that (at least some) metaphors are not mere figures of speech, but actively affect our minds and the way we perceive and think [7; 8]. Thus, certain figures in our language may affect our thinking and are grounded in our mindsets [7; 8; 9; 10]. These conceptual metaphors may be based on sensory or motor experiences we made in early life and now represent scaffolds for our present perceptions and decisions [11]. One example for these conceptual or embodied metaphors is the concept of warmth. It has been demonstrated that feeling physical warmth (holding a warm cup of coffee) makes one likely to perceive an individual as having a trustworthy personality. This has been explained by the warmth metaphor, which links physical warmth to trust [12; 13]. However, it still remains a matter of debate whether linguistic metaphors cause those embodiment effects, or whether \"the metaphors are the result of preverbal mechanisms that shape both our language and thought\" [14]. In the latter view, those embodiment effects might also be present in preverbal infants or even in animals [14; 15]. One of the strongest and most common metaphors seems to be sweet taste, which has been linked to a romantic dimension in many languages. Thus, love is sweet in English, German, and even Mandarin. Numerous studies demonstrate that this metaphor affects our decisions and behavior, and thereby may be described as conceptual or embodied metaphor. For example, [PERSON] et al. [16] induced feelings of romantic love (or jeolousy) by asking participants to write about a time when they felt romantic love (or jeolousy). They then had to rate a drink as part of an unrelated study on \"individual differences in taste sensitivity\" with respect to its taste (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, spicy). The drink was always plain distilled water. Results showed that individuals induced to feel romantic love feelings rated the water as sweeter than those who were instructed to feel jeolousy. No effects were found for other tastes. In particular, the authors did not find that an induced feeling of jeolousy lead to the participants perceiving the water as more bitter. Thus, jeolousy tastes neither bitter nor sour [16], suggesting that not all taste perceptions affect our social perceptions and behavior. [PERSON] et al. examined the same relationship between sweet taste and romantic perceptions but tested the effect in the opposite direction. Participants were given a sweet snack (cookies or soft drink) or a non-sweet control (salt-vinegar chips or distilled water) before being asking to complete a questionnaire on their current or hypothetical relationship. Results showed that participants who consumed the sweet snack evaluated a hypothetical relationship more positively than those who experienced a non-sweet taste. Similarly, the authors could also show that sweet taste made individuals more interested in starting a new romantic relationship [17]. The results are supported by another study examining the effects of sweet taste on the romantic dimension of the sweet metaphor. The authors demonstrated that eating a sweet snack (in contrast to a salty snack) had an impact on subsequent attractiveness ratings of faces (but not of art pictures unrelated to the sweetness metaphor) (see Figure 1) [18].