If you happen to be one of the people who enjoy bitter foods and drinks, this new research could give some insight into your own darker personality traits.
Did you know that if your favorite drink to order is a plain, black coffee or a gin and tonic, it might reveal something more disturbing about your personality, than just a dislike for sweets?
You’ve probably already noticed that you crave certain flavors more often than others. Perhaps you’re one of the many people who has a sweet tooth and craves sugar in everything. Or maybe you just naturally enjoy bitter and salty flavors.
Recently, the researchers at Innsbruck University published a fascinating study that examined the types of foods that different personality traits enjoy eating. In two different studies, they have investigated how bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits.
Individual taste preferences can vary greatly from one person to the next and now this study goes further in depth, to reveal what the flavors we choose most often, might say about our mental health.
More specifically, it focuses on bitter flavors such as beer, tonic water, celery and black coffee and states “the results suggest that how much people like bitter tasting foods and drinks is stably tied to how dark their personality is.”
Both studies confirmed that bitter taste preferences are positively associated with malevolent personality traits, with the biggest relation to sadism and psychopathy.
More than nine hundred people were involved in this study. First, they answered a survey about which flavors they enjoyed the most. Then those results were compared to a questionnaire about their mental health and emotional stability.
Out of the ten bitter items in the survey, only five of them were thought of by the participants as bitter and given the highest rating: coffee, beer, radishes, tonic water, and celery. The second highest category which included cottage cheese, ginger ale, grapefruit juice, rye bread, and tea did not receive the highest rating.
It is also interesting to take note that the research says “Some of the most popular foodstuffs such as coffee, wine, beer, and chili pepper are initially aversive to us. Yet, humans acquire liking for originally unpalatable food due to simple mere exposure.”
Which means that we may not originally have liked some of the foods or drinks when we were younger, that we now routinely enjoy. To put it simply, it’s because we have been exposed to them so much that we learned to appreciate them over time.
“Super-tasting, that is, having a high sensitivity to bitter compounds, has been consistently linked to increased emotionality in humans and rats,” the study said.
In conclusion, at the end of the manuscript, it states “The present research has demonstrated that bitter taste preferences are associated with more pronounced malevolent personality traits, especially robustly with everyday sadism.”
Which might be helpful to remember next time you’re out on a date with someone new. If you pay attention to what they order, then you may discover some deeper insights into their personality and what makes them tick.
These studies are always very interesting to read. It’s amazing to find out new things about our personality traits and how they affect us in different ways during day to day life that we’d probably never thought of before.
What types of food and drinks do you enjoy? Have you ever noticed someone you thought might be a psychopath or sadist that’s prone to eating bitter foods more often than sweet foods? After reading this I think I’ll be paying more attention from now on. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this research.
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