The Effects Of Sour Taste On Jealousy

The word "sour" is often associated with the negative feeling of jealousy in our daily life.In Chinese and English context,there are many sour-related metaphorical expressions such as "jealousy is sour/bitter","taste sour grapes","emotional sour" and so on.This research is based on Embodied Cognition and Conceptual Metaphor Theory to explore the relationship between sour taste and jealousy.This study explores and validates the link between sour taste and jealou feeling through three experiments.The purpose of experiment one is to investigate whether there is an implicit semantic connection between sour taste and jealousy in the Chinese subject group.The researchers used implicit association tasks(IAT)to examine the differences for response time and accuracy in the response and accuracy of the combined classification tasks of sour/bitter words(the same taste vocabulary that is susceptible to negative experiences)and jealousy/non-jealous emotional vocabulary(the same as negative emotional vocabulary).It is found that the subjects showed a significant implicit tendency to associate sour words with jealous feeling words.The purpose of experiment two is to further examine whether the sour image initiation in the Chinese subject group can directly enhance the feeling of jealousy in the jealousy situation.The researchers used food pictures to initiate the sour,sweet,and bitter imaginationed-feelings of the subjects,and examined differences in the level of jealousy intensity and reactions experienced by "I" in two jealous scenarios(relationship and achievement).The results showed that the sour taste experience that initiated by food pictures significantly reinforced the jealousy of the subjects,and the subjects experienced stronger jealousy in relational jealousy situations.The purpose of Experiment three is to further investigate the effect of real taste experience on jealous situational feeling in the Chinese subject group.The researchers asked the subjects to sample sour,sweet and bitter drinks,and examined differences in the level of jealousy intensity and reactions experienced by "I" in two jealous scenarios.It was found that,similar to the semantic initiation and physical image initiation effects,the real sour taste experience significantly reinforced the jealousy of the subjects,and the subjects experienced a stronger sense of jealousy in relational jealousy events.According to the above three experiments,this study has come to the conclusion that there is a metaphorical connection between sour taste and jealousy in the context of Chinese culture.Sour taste is not only semantically related to jealousy,but also directly affects people's jealous experience in jealousy scenarios.That is sour taste reinforces the emotions of jealousy in the jealous scenarios.The results of this study support the theory of conceptual metaphor and expand the field of embodied cognition.