Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0235290 (bitter taste)
 1,408 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

In English, unfair treatment and social injustice are often described as "bitter" experiences, whereas "eating bitterness" refers to endurance in the face of hardship in Chinese. This suggests that bitter taste may ground experiences of adversity in both cultures, but in culture-specific forms. We tested this possibility by assessing Canadian and Chinese participants' responses to fairness and achievement scenarios after incidental exposure to bitter or neutral tastes. Tasting something bitter increased self-reported motivation and intention to invest effort for Chinese participants, but not Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1, 4, 5). Tasting something bitter decreased perceived fairness for Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1-3) but not Chinese participants living in China (Study 2). The fairness judgments of Chinese participants living in Canada shed light on adaptation to the host culture: Bitter taste decreased these participants' fairness judgments after living in Canada for 4 years or more (Study 4), provided they were tested in English (Studies 3-4), but exerted no influence when they were tested in Chinese (Study 4). The observed cultural differences are compatible with a relatively higher emphasis on self-improvement in China versus self-enhancement in Canada. Supporting this conjecture, the fairness judgments of Chinese students in Canada followed the Anglo-Canadian pattern when primed with a self-enhancement motive and the effort judgments of Anglo-Canadian students followed the Chinese pattern when primed with a self-improvement motive (Study 5). This suggest that a universal aversive experience (bitter taste) grounds thought about adversity in ways compatible with cultural orientations and reflected in culture-specific metaphors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:"That's bitter!": Culture-specific effects of gustatory experience on judgments of fairness and advancement. 3311 58