Assessing the Relationship Between Drive for Thinness and Taste–Shape Correspondences

Abstract

Eating disorder tendencies are psychological characteristics that are prevalent in healthy young females and are known to be among the risk factors for eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. People with greater eating disorder tendencies strongly associate sweet and fatty foods with weight gain and strictly avoid consuming such foods. However, little is known about how eating disorder tendencies influence the association between taste and body shape impression. Research on crossmodal correspondences suggests that people preferentially associate sweet tastes with round shapes, and individual differences affect the degree of such associations. This study investigates how the degree of taste–shape matching is related to eating disorder tendencies with a preliminary investigation of what mediates this relationship. Two experiments were conducted: in Experiment 1, healthy participants rated the degree of association between basic taste words (sweet/sour/salty/bitter) and roundness of shape and subsequently completed questionnaires addressing eating disorder tendencies. In Experiment 2, participants answered additional questionnaires addressing obsessiveness, dichotomous thinking, and self-esteem. The results of Experiment 1 indicated a positive correlation between drive for thinness, which is one indicator of an eating disorder tendency, and the degree of matching sweetness to round shape. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 and revealed the mediating effect of obsessiveness. These findings suggest a relationship between individual differences in taste–shape matching and eating disorder tendency and the preliminary mediating role of obsessiveness. The present study provides new insight into the role of sweet–round matching in eating disorder tendencies and the associated psychological mechanisms.

People With High Autistic Traits Show Fewer Consensual Crossmodal Correspondences Between Visual Features and Tastes

“…Individuals with autism tend to have a decreased ability to perform statistical learning with co-occurrences and regularities in the environment, leading to difficulties in associating and integrating sensory information across modalities (Pellicano and Burr, 2012;Stevenson et al, 2014aStevenson et al, , 2017. The autistic effect was observed on color-taste/ shape-color associations, which might be mainly constructed through statistical learning with regularities in the environment (Koch and Koch, 2003;Spence et al, 2015;Saluja and Stevenson, 2018;Hanada, 2019;Higgins and Hayes, 2019;Spence, 2019), while no significant autistic effect was observed on shape-taste associations, which might be mainly explained by semantic meaning correspondences (e.g., hedonic dimensions; Salgado-Montejo et al, 2015;Velasco et al, 2015Velasco et al, , 2016bBlazhenkova and Kumar, 2018;Turoman et al, 2018;De Sousa et al, 2020;Hamamoto et al, 2020;Motoki and Velasco, 2021). Some studies suggested that the semantic/ pleasant ratings on sensory inputs are similar between individuals with autism and controls (Cascio et al, 2012b;Galle et al, 2013;Damiano et al, 2014;Singh, 2019).…”

“… Obrist et al (2014) described both umami and sweet taste as full, mouth-filling experience, and umami also tasted as with lots of things to it, which may lead to the umami–ellipse association. Several studies proposed emotional/semantic correspondence hypotheses to explain shape–taste associations ( Spence and Deroy, 2012b , 2013a ; Salgado-Montejo et al, 2015 ; Velasco et al, 2015 , 2016b , c ; Blazhenkova and Kumar, 2018 ; Turoman et al, 2018 ; De Sousa et al, 2020 ; Hamamoto et al, 2020 ; Motoki and Velasco, 2021 ). For example, Velasco et al (2016b) suggested that semantic meanings (e.g., hedonic) underlying shapes and tastes could explain some of the shape–taste associations.…”

Reduced body-image disturbance by body-image interventions is associated with neural-response changes in visual and social processing regions: a preliminary study

“…To examine participants’ body-image concerns, we used the body-dissatisfaction and drive-for-thinness subscales from the Japanese version of the Eating Disorder Inventory 2 (EDI2) questionnaire ( 82 ), which is the most recent Japanese translation. These two subscales are associated with body-image disturbance ( 83 , 84 ), and scores thereon were obtained before and after the interventions. There were nine and seven items for body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness, respectively.…”