SUMMER 2013 PSI CHI JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH 61 COPYRIGHT 2013 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 18, NO. 2/ISSN 2164-8204) T aste quality is an important factor in dietary choice because it is an indication of nutritional content (Breslin & Spector, 2008). However, the mechanism that translates taste quality to the motivation to choose specific foods is not well understood and is just beginning to be discussed (Rolls, 2011). Since hunger is often accompanied by irritability and discomfort, it is no surprise that eating usually improves general mood (Gibson, 2006), but hunger cannot explain or predict the choice of one food over another, or whether the choice is a matter of taste or perceived caloric (nutritional) content. Associations of taste quality with emotion may be involved in dietary choices. The effect of taste quality on emotion has been somewhat consistent in laboratory tests. Bitter- ness perception in humans is highly variable. For example, a group of randomly sampled individuals may perceive a bitter stimulus as either not at all bitter to highly bitter within the group, producing a range of reactions (Breslin & Spector, 2008). Sweet and sour substances induce facial expressions in both neonates and adults that are consistent with those recognized as joy and disgust, respectively, indicating a consistency of reactions across the life span and a randomly sampled group of people (Greimel, Macht, Krumhuber, & Ellgring, 2006; Steiner, 1974). Fox and Davidson (1986) found that newborns react more quickly to sour water than sweet water, that sweet water is accompanied by positive affect, and that sour water is accom- panied by negative affect. Sweet flavors are rated higher in pleasantness than other flavors and may even increase pain tolerance (Kakeda & Ishikawa, 2011; Lewkowski, Young, Ghosh, & Ditto, 2008). Indeed, not even conditioned emotive responses can change affect felt while tasting a sweet drink (Kuenzel et al., 2010). It appears that the sweet- pleasantness link is only disrupted by the onset of acute stress (from self-report ratings), but quickly rebounds (Al’Absi, Nakajima, Hooker, Wittmers, & Cragin, 2012). Neuroimaging research suggests that, although ABSTRACT. Much of the research exploring the relationship between taste quality and affective state suggests that sweet-tasting foods are associated with pleasant feelings, and sour- and spicy-tasting foods are associated with unpleasant feelings. The findings of arousal response as a component of overall affective state are less clear with respect to taste quality. The present study investigated the relationship between taste quality and affective state by comparing arousal and pleasantness ratings of neutral images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Participants (N = 55) recorded these ratings during consumption of sprays which varied in taste quality (sweet, sour, or spicy). As hypothesized, sweet sprays elicited significantly higher ratings of pleasantness than sour or spicy sprays (η 2 p = .14) on the neutral images. However, arousal ratings did not differ among the three taste quality conditions. Implications of the findings in a broader framework and suggestions for future research are discussed. Infuence of Taste Quality on Afective State Alexander B. Swan, Avichg Cohen, Samantha R. Evans, and Barbara A. Drescher California State University, Northridge