What is the link between personality and food behavior?

Abstract

A number of personality characteristics have been linked to various aspects of taste (gustation), trigeminal, and olfactory perception. In particular, personality traits have been linked to olfactory sensory thresholds and olfactory identification abilities, as well as to the sensory-discriminative aspects of taste/flavour perception. To date, much of the research in this area has focused on Sensation Seeking (including Experience Seeking, and Openness to Novel Experiences), with the latter being linked to a preference for spicy, and possibly also crunchy, sour, and bitter foods/drinks. Novelty-seeking has also been linked to a preference for salty foods, while anxious individuals appear to enjoy a much narrower range of foods. A bidirectional link has also been documented between taste and mood. Certain of the personality-based differences in taste/flavour perception and food behaviour have been linked to differences in circulating levels of neurotransmitters and hormones in both normal and clinical populations. Taken together, therefore, the evidence that has been published to date supports a number of intriguing connections between personality traits and taste perception/food behaviour.

You Eat How You Think: A Review on the Impact of Cognitive Styles on Food Perception and Behavior

“…In comparison, there are relatively fewer peer-reviewed journal articles seeking to explain the impact of psychological variables on how consumers perceive their food. While there have been ample amounts of research into individual differences in specific psychological variables, such as food-evoked emotions [9] or personality traits [10,11] in food-related contexts, there is a research gap when looking at how psychological theories of cognitive styles apply to both group and individual differences. These cognitive style theories can encompass many of the more minute psychological variables (e.g., emotional states or responses) and thus offer a great deal of interest into understanding how consumers perceive and behave toward foods.…”

Spicy Food and Chili Peppers and Multiple Health Outcomes: Umbrella Review

“…[ 48 ] A range of Asian‐based diets contain spicy food compared with Western countries; similarly, the prevalence of obesity is as low as 3%, but it is well over 10% in most Western countries. [ 49 ] A large‐scale nationwide Internet data‐based study in China including 212 314 708 individuals reported that dietary preferences ranged by geographical distribution, with higher altitude regions covering large proportions of spicy food; likewise, spicy food appetite was inversely connected to diabetes risk. [ 50 ] Further studies are needed to clarify the interaction between dietary preferences and environmental health.…”

A systematic review on the flavor of soy‐based fermented foods: Core fermentation microbiome, multisensory flavor substances, key enzymes, and metabolic pathways

“…Correspondingly, subjects consuming a high concentration of sugar solution and a low concentration of sugar solution will also experience different levels of spiciness at the same concentration of capsaicin (Tian et al., 2021). Therefore, food flavor is not a separate sense, but multiple senses built on a complex material basis, mainly including physical senses, chemical senses, and psychological senses (Araujo et al., 2020; Spence, 2022), and current research on food flavor chemistry focuses mainly on chemical senses. Most of the existing literature on food flavor refers to the taste and smell senses produced by various chemical substances, and more in‐depth research is needed for more complex trigeminal senses and their connection to personality traits.…”