You see what you eat: effects of spicy food on emotion perception

Spice up the moment: The influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspectives on time

“…Taste and Anger. In congruence with the previous studies where spicy taste was found to be associated with anger (Chen et al, 2023;Ji et al, 2013), we also observed distinguishably different degrees of aroused angry emotion between conditions, χ2 1, 320 = 312.727, p < .001, Cramer's V = 0.989 (Table 5), evident in the results that people who tasted spicy peanuts reported stronger angry attitude toward the changed meeting (Mspicy = 3.981, SD = 1.141) than their counterparts who tasted salty peanuts (Msalty = 1.013, SD = 0.111).…”

“…Spicy-Anger Relationship From the Perspective of Embodied Cognition. In coherence with prior findings that enjoyment and consumption of spicy food are positively related to anger (Batra et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2023), our results indicated that spicy (vs. salty) ingestion aroused greater angry feeling toward a temporal rearrangement (Study 3). As maintained by embodied cognition, bodily experiences scaffold cognitive processes (Barsalou, 2008).…”

“…This assurance allowed us to proceed with the investigation into the possible contributors behind this novel relationship. Emotion and psychology studies have consistently suggested that spicy taste is related to anger and aggression (e.g., Chen et al, 2023) that both feature approach motivation (e.g., Harmon-Jones & Schutter, 2022). This, coupled with the finding that the ego-moving metaphor is associated with anger by virtue of common approach motivation in space (e.g., Hauser et al, 2009) led to the inference that spicy taste would foster a propensity for the ego-moving perspective with spicy-induced angry emotion and approach motivation acting as possible contributors.…”

“…Concretely, Study 1 and Study 2 probed whether spicy taste enjoyment and consumption would be more likely to evoke the ego-moving perspective when disambiguating the "Next Wednesday's meeting" question (Li, 2020) and it was revealed that people who enjoyed spicy taste more (vs. those who enjoyed it less) and participants who ingested spicy chips (vs. those who ingested salty chips) displayed a preference for the ego-moving perspective. Because spicy taste is associated with anger and approach motivation (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009;Chen et al, 2023;Harmon-Jones & Schutter, 2022) that predicted the egomoving perspective (Hauser et al, 2009), we hypothesized that the taste-time link discovered might be related to spicy-aroused anger and approach motivation. Study 3 provided confirmatory evidence that spicy (vs. salty) intake led to the inclination toward the ego-moving perspective with heightened angry feeling toward and intensified approach-motivated perception of the rescheduled meeting.…”