Loading...
Whether experiencing the five tastes (sour, salty, bitter, sweet, and umani) differentially affects risky behavior is poorly understood. To learn more, researchers separately studied 70 individuals from the U.K. (46 women; mean age, 25) and 71 Vietnamese people (45 women; mean age, 20).
Participants were assigned to ingest water (i.e., neutral taste) and a solution with one taste, in counterbalanced order. The taste groups were stratified to have equivalent impulsivity scores. The participants undertook a computer-based balloon task, which comprised pumping up a virtual balloon by clicking a computer mouse; balloons were set to yield cash rewards or to explode, resulting in loss of all earnings.
Ingesting the sour solution was associated with…