Being Prompted To Think About Coffee Elevates Your Physiological Arousal And Focuses Your Mind, No Ingestion Required

By Christian Jarrett So entrenched is the association in our culture between coffee and ideas of arousal, ambition and focus that merely thinking about, or being reminded of, the drink is enough to increase the body’s arousal levels, in turn provoking a more focused, literal cognitive style. That’s according to Eugene Chan at Monash University and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto Scarborough who, reporting their findings in Consciousness and Cognition, write that “… people may be more aroused simply after walking by a coffee shop. Not only would they be more aroused, but at a more downstream level, their decision making might shift as well.” The intriguing results come from four studies involving hundreds of online and lab-based participants, but given the replication problems in the general area of “social priming” (concerned with how abstract ideas and sensory experiences can influence thoughts and behaviour, and vice versa), some readers may find that merely hearing about this new research is enough to elevate their pulse and alter their mindset to a more sceptical mode. The four studies followed a similar pattern and no drinks were actually ingested. They started with participants being cued to think about either coffee or tea. In one study, they had to come up with advertising slogans for coffee or tea (depending on which group they were allocated to); in the other studies, they read either a mocked-up health news story a...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: biological Cognition Decision making Source Type: blogs