A lot of research goes into food. This is typical, as food is one of the basic human necessities. From childhood, the four basic tastes taught by the basic education system is: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. There’s a new taste in town however, and it’s called umami. It’s still a little bit controversial, in the sense that some people still refuse to recognize it as a basic taste. Umami is a Japanese word, meaning savory.
Through these four basic tastes, a lot has been discovered. The chemicals that can provide these tastes, the taste receptors that recognize these tastes, and from which specific cortex the tastes are recognized in the brain. Perception psychology has contributed a lot to data regarding taste.
As psychology majors, it’s our job to be able to think up of new ways of researching for more data on food, like figuring out which factors or social constructs are able to affect the way we perceive food. After all, we Filipinos take pleasure in eating with others, even when all we have are two hands and one big banana leaf in front of us. Food just seems so much tastier with great company, which is why we never hesitate to go to the next fiesta spread or to go try new restaurants with the barkada. Eating with friends is a way to celebrate our ups and downs in life as well, whether it’s pigging out after passing a hard exam or comfort eating together after a bad breakup. Since previous research indicates that moods always affect your perception of things, we decided to research on the effect of mood and relationship closeness on taste perception, namely for the sweet taste in cookies.
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| A well-timed study, considering that Christmas feasts will be starting soon. |
In our environment where everything happens, any event that catches our attention might influence and change our moods. Mood is a "general and pervasive feeling state that is not directed toward a specific target” (Wood, Saltzberg, and Goldstampt, 1990) which occurs as a response to situations that happen in the environment (Isen, 1984). On the other hand, relationship closeness is pretty similar to our concept of kapwa. It’s when our representation of the self or ‘me’ as being a part of our representation of others. So the higher the relationship closeness, the greater the overlap between the ‘self’ and ‘others’(Aron & Fraley, 1999).
Previous research has already shown that we tend to eat more when we’re around other people, especially if it’s people that we know (Hetherington, Anderson, Norton, & Newson, 2006). While that doesn’t necessarily mean that we taste differently when we’re around other people, research has also found that eating chocolate together with someone else enhances how much we like or dislike the chocolate (Boothby, Clark, & Bargh, 2014). As for mood, depressed people tend to taste sweetness and bitterness more intensely after feeling a positive or negative mood (Platte, Herbert, Pauli, & Breslin, 2013). But is this true even for the non-depressed?
For our experiment, we looked for 120 volunteers from the Psych 101 subject pool. Days before our actual data gathering schedule, we posted several sign-up sheets for an experiment entitled COOKIE MONSTER (we even drew a cute Cookie Monster on it) on a bulletin board near the classrooms hoping that the students would be interested in participating. Luckily, throughout our data collection we did not have any problems looking for participants (in fact the challenge was how to accommodate all the students who wanted to walk-in). In the end we only had time and research participation credits for 124 participants but at least it's 4 more than our initial intended number.
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| Cookie says Hi! |
Upon arrival outside the experiment room, we asked the participants if they came with a friend or if they signed-up for a solo/stranger slot. Of course, being the sigurista experimenters that we were, we re-checked and quantified the relationship levels of the participants using both a qualitative (small talk while waiting for their turn) and a quantitative method (Person Scale & Interpersonal Solidarity Scale which was administered in the middle of the experiment).
Our actual experiment involved 8 phases that would take about 20-30 minutes in total. A pretty good cover-up story was also used to divert the attention of the participants from guessing our real research objective and to justify the fact that they had to eat the cookies provided while inside the room. Don’t worry; we debriefed our participants before letting them go so there was no harm done besides that of the minimal deception.
We told our participants that we wanted to see how a shared experience, like watching a video, affected their perceived closeness to each other. The mood scales were there, we said, just so that we could check if they were feeling any extreme emotions that could affect the results. As for the cookies, they were told that they were actually free cookies provided by our sponsors!
Anyways, going back to the experiment procedures, the first thing we did upon the arrival of the participants was to give them a consent form and to instruct them about what they would do. Once they agreed to participate, we administered the PANAS-X test to determine a baseline of their moods. Since in this research we are looking at the effects of mood and relationship closeness on taste perception, after they have answered the aforementioned scale, we presented them with either a happy video or a sad video to alter their moods. For the happy condition, we used one of the impossible challenges try not to laugh videos you can find in YouTube. In the same way, we used 2 Thai insurance commercials (those that make the ninjas inside the room cut onions…) from YouTube to induce the sad mood. Ok, so now the question is whether the videos worked. Statistical analysis showed that the videos were effective, so effective in fact that during the experiment the participants were either laughing their hearts out or trying to stifle their tears.
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| Impossible Challenge |
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| My Dad is a Liar |
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| Silence of Love |
So now comes the cookie. Each participant was given one cookie to eat while they watch the video. The cookies provided were homemade and baked the day before the experiment. We altered a cookie recipe readily available online to make them taste less sweet and we removed the chocolate chips and nuts so as to make the cookies as simple as possible. You can find the actual recipe we used to for the cookies before the references part of this blog. You guys should try it sometime especially if you are fond of not too sweet desserts.
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| PANAS v. 1 |
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| PANAS v. 2 *Would you believe that these two are actually identical? |
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| The Person Scale |
When we searched the vast ocean of research, we found several studies that stated being happy increased the perception of sweetness (Boothby, Clark, & Bargh, 2014;Platte, Herbert, Pauli, & Breslin 2013). Unfortunately, it was not to be. There are, after all, other studies that did not obtain a significant perception of sweetness (Dichter et al., 2010), and ours happened to be one of them. Perhaps Filipinos are just so accustomed to sweet cuisine, that it affected our perception of sweetness.
We did find some pretty interesting (and sometimes unexpected) results though. In fact, there was a positive effect of mood induction and relationship closeness on bitterness. This means that those who felt happy and were with a friend actually sensed bitter tastes more accurately. As unusual as it may seem, we also found out that individuals who are with their friends perceived sourness when the positive mood is induced. This might be because an enhanced state of arousal when mood was induced. A similar case happened in Platte, Herbert, Pauli, & Breslin’s (2013) study, wherein they obtained significant sourness scores for both happy and sad conditions! We postulate that while arousal does happen when one is happy or sad, one may become more aroused when happy as compared to sad. There was also an significant interaction between relationship closeness and mood, which affected sour scores. In a way, this wasn’t all that surprising. We do tend to experience greater feelings of excitement when other people are around, especially when they’re people we know.
There still seems to be a long road ahead. Sometimes sweetness doesn’t significantly increase when we’re happy. Maybe we tend to be more sensitive to bitterness when we’re with a friend. Either way, we must continue to search for the tasty truth.
Cookie Recipe
Ingredients:2 ¼ cups all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup softened butter
¾ cups granulated sugar
¾ cups packed brown sugar
1teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in a large mixing bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets. Finally bake for 9 minutes or until golden brown.
References:
Aron, A., & Fraley, B. (1999). Relationship closeness as including other in the self: Cognitive
underpinnings and measures. Social Cognition, 17(2), 140–160.
doi:10.1521/soco.1999.17.2.140
Boothby, E. J., Clark, M. S., & Bargh, J. A. (2014). Shared experiences are amplified.
Psychological science, 25(12), 2209-2216.
Hetherington, M. M., Anderson, A. S., Norton, G. N. M., & Newson, L. (2006). Situational effects on meal intake: A comparison of eating alone and eating with others. Physiology & Behavior, 88(4-5), 498–505. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2006.04.025
Isen, A. M. (1984). Toward understanding the role of affect in cognition. In Sedikides, C. (1992). Changes in the Valence of the Self as a Function of Mood. Personality and Social Psychology Review, pp. 271-311
Platte, P., Herbert, C., Pauli, P., Breslin, P. A. S. (2013) Oral perceptions of fat and taste stimuli are modulated by affect and mood induction. PLoS ONE, 8(6):e65006. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065006
Wood, J.V., Saltzberg, J.A., & Goldstampt, L.A (1990). Does affect induce self-focused attention? In Sedikides, C. (1992). Changes in the Valence of the Self as a Function of Mood. Personality and Social Psychology Review, pp. 271-311
Photo Credits:
[Photo of a painting of a Filipino family having dinner]. Retrieved from http://static.squarespace.com/static/5411d80ae4b02fc94fefce4a/5457e7a5e4b06c364300fd00/5457e901e4b06c3643013042/1291127341000/G00003.jpg?format=original
