Researchers Yi Luo and Kenneth Kishida and their team examined the dual role of expectations, showing that positive expectations increase the pleasure and reward process, while negative expectations increase pain and discomfort.
The study involved 47 participants with varying taste preferences who underwent an MRI while tasting hot sauce. Participants were classified according to their attitudes towards spicy tastes and given “contextual clues” about the spiciness of the sauce. The results showed that people with positive expectations experienced increased pleasure and increased neural activity in reward-related areas of the brain. At the same time, negative expectations caused the enjoyment of spicy tastes to decrease.
Burning question.
Source: Ferra
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
