A taster for time: Monday is sweeter than Friday

Abstract

Space-time metaphors in English and Chinese connote two metaphorical representations of time in space: the ego-moving representation and the time-moving representation. Extant research thereon has evinced that the choice of either is subject to both spatial and non-spatial factors (e.g., emotion). Conjoining two separate lines of inquiry, one into the relationship between emotion and time and the other into the metaphorical associations between taste and emotion, the current research examined the bidirectional relationship between taste and time. In Study 1, participants tasted sweet-, sour-, bitter-, and spicy-dominated snacks before responding to the temporally ambiguous “Next Wednesday’s meeting” question (Li, 2019) and the results showed that those who tasted sweet snack reported more time-moving perspectives than ego-moving perspectives whereas the opposite tendency was registered in those who tasted the other three snacks. The taste-aroused approach motivation rather than the taste-induced emotion was a reliable predictor of the temporal perspective preference. By priming participants with either the time-moving or the ego-moving frame of reference, Study 2 investigated the reverse influence of temporal perspective on taste preference and the results indicated that compared to the ego-moving prime, the time-moving prime prompted a distinctively stronger liking for the sweet-tasting snack as a result of relatively low happiness and approach motivation. Taken together, the results suggest that how people metaphorically conceptualize time can be modulated by taste, providing corroborative evidence for the embodied cognition that the understanding of abstract concepts are grounded in sensory, motor, and affective experiences.