Dispositional Properties of Metaphor
The Predictive Power of the Sweet Taste Metaphor for Trait and Daily Prosociality
Abstract
Abstract. Metaphors often characterize prosocial actions and people as sweet. Three studies sought to explore whether conceptual metaphors of this type can provide insights into the prosocial trait of agreeableness and into daily life prosociality. Study 1 (n = 698) examined relationships between agreeableness and food taste preferences. Studies 2 (n = 66) and 3 (n = 132) utilized daily diary protocols. In Study 1, more agreeable people liked sweet foods to a greater extent. In Study 2, greater sweet food preferences predicted a stronger positive relationship between daily prosocial behaviors and positive affect, a pattern consistent with prosocial motivation. Finally, Study 3 found that daily prosocial feelings and behaviors varied positively with sweet food consumption in a manner that could not be ascribed to positive affect or self-control. Altogether, the findings encourage further efforts to extend conceptual metaphor theory to the domain of personality processes, in part by building on balance-related ideas.
References
1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
(1958).
(The metaphor: A psychological inquiry . In R. TagiuriL. PetrulloEds., Person perception and interpersonal behavior (pp. 86–94). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.2014). The HEXACO Honesty-Humility, agreeableness, and emotionality factors: A review of research and theory. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18, 139–152. doi: 10.1177/1088868314523838
(2014). Do prosocial people prefer sweet-tasting foods? An attempted replication of Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012). Journal of Research in Personality, 52, 42–46. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.06.006
(1981). Altruism as hedonism: Helping and self-gratification as equivalent responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 1039–1046. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.40.6.1039
(1996). Self-regulation failure: An overview. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 1–15. doi: 10.1207/s15327965pli0701_1
(2003). Diary methods: Capturing life as it is lived. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 579–616. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145030
(1998). Personal goals and emotional well-being: The moderating role of motive dispositions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 494–508. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.75.2.494
(2010). The contribution of agreeableness and self-efficacy beliefs to prosociality. European Journal of Personality, 24, 36–55. doi: 10.1002/per.739
(2013). What do love and jealousy taste like? Emotion, 13, 1142–1149. doi: 10.1037/a0033758
(1988). Sweet tooth demonstrated: Individual differences in preference for both sweet foods and foods highly sweetened. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 73, 275–280. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.73.2.275
(2009). Experience sampling methods: A modern idiographic approach to personality research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3, 292–313. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00170.x
(2007). Balance theory, unit relations, and attribution: The underlying integrity of Heiderian theory. Review of General Psychology, 11, 12–30. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.11.1.12
(2009). Conceptual metaphors of affect. Emotion Review, 1, 129–139. doi: 10.1177/1754073908100438
(2012).
(Balanced identity theory: Review of evidence for implicit consistency in social cognition . In B. GawronskiF. StrackEds., Cognitive consistency: A fundamental principle in social cognition (pp. 157–177). New York, NY: Guilford Press.2015). Math achievement, stereotypes, and math self-concepts among elementary-school students in Singapore. Learning and Instruction, 39, 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2015.04.002
(1997). Taste preferences and food intake. Annual Review of Nutrition, 17, 237–253. doi: 10.1146/annurev.nutr.17.1.237
(2007). Centering predictor variables in cross-sectional multilevel models: A new look at an old issue. Psychological Methods, 12, 121–138. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.12.2.121
(2009).
(Reward systems . In M. de HaanM. R. GunnarEds., Handbook of developmental social neuroscience (pp. 324–341). New York, NY: Guilford Press.2007).
(Studying personality processes: Explaining change in between-persons longitudinal and within-person multilevel models . In R. W. RobinsR. C. FraleyR. F. KruegerEds., Handbook of research methods in personality psychology (pp. 523–542). New York, NY: Guilford Press.1999). On feeling good and being rude: Affective influences on language use and request formations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 928–939. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.928
(2010).
(The effortful and energy-demanding nature of prosocial behavior . In M. MikulincerP. R. ShaverEds., Prosocial motives, emotions, and behavior: The better angels of our nature (pp. 169–180). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.2012). Back to the future of dissonance theory: Cognitive consistency as a core motive. Social Cognition, 30, 652–668. doi: 10.1521/soco.2012.30.6.652
(2007). I like it, because I like myself: Associative self-anchoring and post-decisional change of implicit evaluations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 221–232. doi: 10.1521/soco.2012.30.6.652
(2008). Pleasure and pressure based prosocial motivation: Divergent relations to subjective well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 399–420. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2007.07.002
(1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
(2015). The role of nature and nurture in conceptual metaphors: The case of gustatory priming. Social Psychology, 46, 167–173. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000238
(1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4, 26–42. doi: 10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26
(1999).
(A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models . In I. MervieldeI. DearyF. De FruytF. OstendorfEds., Personality psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007
(2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504–528.
(2005). Goldberg’s “IPIP” Big-Five factor markers: Internal consistency and concurrent validity in Scotland. Personality and Individual Differences, 39, 317–329. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.011
(2012). The power of good intentions: Perceived benevolence soothes pain, increases pleasure, and improves taste. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 639–645. doi: 10.1177/1948550611433470
(1997).
(Agreeableness: A dimension of personality . In R. HoganJ. A. JohnsonS. R. BriggsEds., Handbook of personality (pp. 795–824). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.2007). Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: A person × situation perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 583–599. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.93.4.583
(2002). A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept. Psychological Review, 109, 3–25. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.3
(2016). Searching for the prosocial personality: A Big Five approach to linking personality and prosocial behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42, 1177–1192. doi: 10.1177/0146167216652859
(1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
(1999).
(The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives . In L. A. PervinO. P. JohnEds., Handbook of personality psychology: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102–138). New York, NY: Guilford Press.1988). The language of love: The semantics of passion in conversational English. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press.
(1986). A figure of thought. Metaphor & Symbolic Activity, 1, 215–225. doi: 10.1207/s15327868ms0103_4
(1999). Philosophy in the flesh. New York, NY: Basic Books.
(2010). A metaphor-enriched social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 1045–1067. doi: 10.1037/a0020970
(2014).
(Introduction . In M. LandauM. D. RobinsonB. P. MeierEds., The power of metaphor: Examining its influence on social life (pp. 3–16). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.2012). Bidirectionality, mediation, and moderation of metaphorical effects: The embodiment of social suspicion and fishy smells. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 737–749. doi: 10.1037/a0029708
(1991). Some psychometric characteristics of gender diagnosticity measures: Reliability, validity, consistency across domains, and relationship to the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 1000–1011. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.61.6.1000
(2014). Agreeableness and preference for sweet tastes. Retrieved from open science framework. Osf.io/w72zj
(2012). Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 163–174. doi: 10.1037/a0025253
(2012). Embodiment in social psychology. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 705–716. doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01212.x
(2011). A comparison of Agreeableness scores from the Big Five Inventory and the NEO PI-R: Consequences for the study of Narcissism and Psychopathy. Assessment, 18, 335–339. doi: 10.1177/1073191111411671
(1994). Cross-situational generality and the interpersonal circumplex. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 921–933. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.66.5.921
(2002). Math = male, me = female, therefore math ≠ me. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 44–59. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.83.1.44
(2012). Scientific utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 615–631. doi: 10.1177/1745691612459058
(2005). Implicit egotism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 106–110. doi: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00344.x
(2005). Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365–392. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070141
(1995).
(Measuring the prosocial personality . In J. N. ButcherC. D. SpielbergerEds., Advances in personality assessment (Vol. 10, pp. 147–163). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.2005). Nature and nurture: Genetic and environmental influences on behavior. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 600, 86–98. doi: 10.1177/0002716205277184
(2006). Computational tools for probing interactions in multiple linear regression, multilevel modeling, and latent curve analysis. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 31, 437–448. doi: 10.3102/10769986031004437
(2015). Sweet love: The effects of sweet taste experience on romantic perceptions. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32, 905–921. doi: 10.1177/0265407514554512
(2015).
(Personality processes and processes as personality: A cognitive perspective . In M. MikulincerP. R. ShaverL. M. CooperR. LarsenEds., APA handbook of personality and social psychology (pp. 129–145). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.2013). Ventromedial prefrontal cortex response to concentrated sucrose reflects liking rather than sweet quality coding. Chemical Senses, 38, 585–594. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjt029
(2016). Individual differences in bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits. Appetite, 96, 299–308. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2015.09.031
(2015). The sweet taste of gratitude: Feeling grateful increases choice and consumption of sweets. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25, 561–576. doi: 10.1016/j.jcps.2015.02.006
(1996). What makes for a good day? Competence and autonomy in the day and in the person. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1270–1279. doi: 10.1177/01461672962212007
(2002). Structural dynamics of cognition: From consistency theories to constrain satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 283–294. doi: 10.1207/S15327957PSPR0604_03
(1998). Using SAS PROC MIXED to fit multilevel models, hierarchical models, and individual growth models. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 23, 323–355. doi: 10.3102/10769986023004323
(2004). Higher self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72, 271–322. doi: 10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x
(2000). Mood and temperament. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
(2007). Understanding the role of the self in prime-to-behavior effects: The active-self account. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 234–261. doi: 10.1177/1088868307302223
(1996).
(A dyadic-interactional perspective on the five-factor model . In J. S. WigginsEd., The five-factor model of personality: Theoretical perspectives (pp. 88–162). New York, NY: Guilford Press.1988). Psychometric and geometric characteristics of the Revised Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS-R). Multivariate Behavioral Research, 23, 517–530. doi: 10.1207/s15327906mbr2304_8
(1989). Providing help and desired relationship type as determinants of changes in moods and self-evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 722–734. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.56.5.722
(2013). Person and thing orientations: Psychological correlates and predictive validity. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 116–123. doi: 10.1177/1948550612444320
(2013). A matter of taste: Gustatory sensations influence personality judgments. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social and Community Studies, 7, 25–33. doi: 10.18848/2324-7576/CGP/v07i01/53508
(2014). Activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex covaries with revealed social preferences: Evidence for person-invariant value. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 464–469. doi: 10.1093/scan/nst005
(2013). Intuitive prosociality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 466–470. doi: 10.1177/0963721413492764
(2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science, 313, 1451–1452. doi: 10.1126/science.1130726
(