Love Is A Sweet Treat

Dear Yana,

                I love reading books and have watched a thousand movies, and I often come across metaphors such as “love is sweet” or “bitter jealousy”. As a literature student, I became curious as to how these metaphors came about – how bodily sensations can be connected to abstract concepts such as love and jealousy. I came across your blog of Psychology students taking up Sensation and Perception, and I decided to put forward my question in the hopes that you will be able to provide me with the answer.

                I am very interested to know how these metaphors came about, and if there is truth behind love being sweet or jealousy being bitter or sour. Finding the answers to these will help me enrich my experience as a Literature student.

                Thank you very much!

Senserely yours,

I’m the Juliet to your Romeo

Dear I’m the Juliet to your Romeo,

Thank you for taking your time to write to us here at Senserely yours! You’re right, we are a group of Psychology students taking up a Sensation and Perception course. Fortunately, I think I’ll be able (hopefully!) to provide you the answers that you need :)

         Despite the fact that decades of research had been allotted to demonstrate that emotions does influence social perception (Forgas, 2000 as cited in Chan, tong, Tan, & Koh, 2013), far less is known about hoe emotions affect basic, low-level sensory perceptions, such as the one you mentioned earlier (e.g., sweet, bitter/sour). However, it is not uncommon that we encounter several references of emotion to bodily sensations. I have personally encountered such metaphors when I read books, watch movies, even listening to songs. In fact, Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) showed that the “love is sweet” metaphor is prevalent in romantically endearing terms (e.g., “sweetheart”), song titles, and literature (e.g., Romeo and Juliet’s “...my sweet love”). Likewise, “jealousy is sour/bitter” metaphor can be found in Chinese (Yu, 1998 as cited in Chan et al., 2013) and old German (The equivalent of jealousy is “Eifersucht” which literally means bitter-sickness). Here in our own country, especially among youth, feelings of “bitterness” is connected to negative emotions or jealousy (most often in a romantic context).

In addition to those you have mentioned, there have also been several studies showing how embodied cognition is applied in metaphors. Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) briefly outlined these studies -  the association of importance to heaviness (e.g., “this issue carries some weight”), affection to physical warmth (“he’s acting cold toward me”), happiness is up (“his spirits lifted”), power is up (“acting high and mighty”), and anger is heat (“he is being hot-headed”).

A study done by Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) showed that induced love led to sweeter ratings of a candy, a chocolate, and even bland distilled water, whereas induced jealousy failed to induce higher sour or bitter ratings. Additionally, participants induced to feel love produced higher ratings of sweetness than those induced to feel happy. In other words, love does “tastes” sweet, although jealousy does not exactly “taste” sour or bitter, despite what its metaphorical associations might suggest.

What could account for the love-sweetness relationship? Chan, tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) outlined several possible explanations derived from previous studies. One explanation pertains to the application of the perceptual symbol system (PSS) theory (Barsalou, 1999), which predicts that reexperiences of particular psychological states (e.g, love) can elicit physical sensations (e.g., sweetness) if these sensations were encoded in modal nodes during past psychological experiences. Big words, right? What this simply means is that repeated association due to past experiences between psychological experiences and physical sensations can account for the effect (e.g., feelings of social exclusion have been found to lead to lower ratings of room temperature, “feeling cold and lonely”). Another explanation is through amodal semantic priming. Lee and Schwarz (2012 as cited in Chan et al., 2013) showed that the embodied effect of fishiness and social suspicion was mediated by semantic associations. These associations could be acquired through embodiment, which goes back to the primary thesis of Lakoff & Johnson’s  (1987, 1999 as cited in Chan et al., 2013) work – bodily metaphors formed from repeated pairings of abstract psychological states and concrete physical sensations. The third explanation refers to what is called neural coactivation or mediation by the neural reward circuitry shared between love experiences and sweet sensations. Activity in the anterior cingulated cortex is associated with both visual presentation os one’s romantic partner (Bartels & Zeki, 2000) and when tasting sugar (De Araujo et al., 2003). It is therefore possible that when one experiences love, the anterior cingulated cortex would activate representations associated with sweetness, thereby eliciting sweetness sensations even without actual sweetness input from an external source (Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh, 2013).

We move from these explanations of embodied metaphors to cover a larger scope about the topic. Consider the expression, “Sweet victory” (achievement is sweet). Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) emphasized that unless there is a repeated history of consuming sweet products as one experiences accomplishments, the embodiment of achievement in sweet taste should be unlikely. Without evidence of such historical pairings, perhaps these findings consistent with the metaphor should be interpreted as semantic priming effects (Lee & Schwarz, 2012), rather than being embodied in the sense of being based on actual physical-psychological grounding. In other words, to be able to claim that a metaphor is embodied, various sources of evidence need to be considered side by side, like smantic activations (Lee & Schwarz, 2012), the involvement of neural systems (Anderson, 2010), and especially, possible ontological groundings (Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh, 2013).

Meanwhile, the inability of induced jealousy to create sensations of sourness or bitterness implies several possible explanations. Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh (2013) forwarded that their measures for sourness or bitterness were not sensitive enough, or that their participants were generally bad at judging sourness and bitterness. However, this seems unlikely because all taste measures were administered in the same way. Second, although research has shown that people are actually much more sensitive to sour- and bitter-tasting substances than sweet-tasting substances (Stevens, 1996 as cited in Chan et al., 2013), results were still significant for the love condition but not for the jealousy condition. The null effect of jealousy on sour or bitterness is consistent with the lack of theoretically viable embodied connections between jealousy and these tastes (Chan, Tong, Tan, & Koh, 2013). Further evidence needs to be forwarded to identify the co-occurences between experiences of jealousy and tasting bitterness or sourness. From these results, it is concluded not to assume that all bodily metaphors are necessarily embodied (Casasanto, 2009; Ijzerman & Koole, 2011 as cited in Chan et al., 2013).

In conclusion, some metaphors have an embodied basis and also produce metaphor-consistent effects, such as “love is sweet”. Meanwhile, some bodily metaphors may not produce effects that are inconsistent with what they represent, such as “jealousy is bitter/sour”. Perhaps, as Chan et al. (2013) suppose, these metaphors (e.g, “jealousy is sour/bitter”) are mapped because of structural similarities between source and target domains (e.g., both are negatively valenced), or that they share similar consequences (e.g., sour acids are corrosive to the body, just as jealousy is corrosive to a relationship; jealousy is poisonous; just as bitter foods indicate possible toxins). Other examples such as “betrayal is a bitter pill” and “spice up your sex life” may make us wonder if it leads to biased perceptions of the sensations they represent. We are also not sure if these metaphors have an embodied basis, yet the metaphor still stands in how it is able to associate these emotions with certain tastes. Perhaps future research can explore these possibilities as we hope for more exciting discoveries J I hope that I was able to answer your question.

Senserely yours,

Yana



References
Chan, K., Tong, E.W., Tan, D.H., & Koh, A.Q. (2013). What do love and jealousy taste like?. Emotion, 13(6), 1142-1149. doi:10.1037/a0033758