Abstract
Among the different tastes, the preference for spiciness seems to be quite common around the world. While widely liked by many people, the psychological effects of eating spicy food have not received too much attention. Can the preference and consumption of spicy food affect our behaviors? More importantly, can spicy food eating affect our emotion perception process which is the core driver of social cognition? The present research explores these questions. More specially, the results showed that spicy food preference positively predicted the perceptual sensitivity for the facial expression of anger and disgust, and the relationship was mediated by trait aggression and trait pathogen avoidance. Additionally, we further explored the effects of spicy food consumption on the perception of anger and disgust, the results demonstrated that consuming spicy food can increase individual’s state aggression, which subsequently facilitates the perception of angry expressions. The results of these studies will help us to reveal that how the taste of spiciness shapes the emotion perception process. They will deepen our understanding of the emotion perception process and the relationship between our mind and body, and have great implications for our food industry and our policymakers.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code Availability
The code employed to perform the current study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
We employed the formula described by Wood et al. (2016). Following Wood et al. (2016), the package of ‘nls2’ in R environment was employed for this calculation. The constants of 0.23, 0.81, 0.28 and 0.72 were selected as appropriate lower and upper bounds for the sigmoid curve since they were the mean response at the extreme ends of thcontinuum (Wood et al., 2016).
The morph movie task was employed in Study 3 since it has less trials and it is easier than the XAB task which makes it more suitable for the investigation of the temporary effects of experimental manipulation on expression perception (e.g., the effects of manipulation of facial mimicry; Niedenthal et al., 2001; Ishii et al., 2020).
For all morphed expression movies, they all began with a prototypic expression and then gradually transitioned to the neutral expression.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31300870) and the Outstanding Young Scientific Research Project of Hunan Provincial Department of Education (19B361).
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Qi Wu and Siwei Zhang conceived and designed the studies. All the authors performed the studies and analyzed the data. Dongfang Chen drafted the paper. All the authors participated in the revising of the paper, approved the version’s publishment, and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.
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Chen, D., Zhang, S., Wu, Q. et al. You see what you eat: effects of spicy food on emotion perception. Curr Psychol 43, 3275–3291 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04585-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04585-2