PSYCHOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF SUGAR CONSUMPTION1

ABSTRACT This paper reviews some of the research on the sweet taste which has been published during the past several decades. It stresses the division of our understanding of sweetness into three sections: quality (type of taste, and the role of sweetness), measurement of sweetness intensity or strength of the perception and the correlation with physical measurements, and finally the hedonics of sweetness which represents the affective portion. Data is presented from a real‐world study on the sweetness and liking of a beverage which illustrates that although children and adults may perceive the sensory characteristics of sweetness in similar manners, nonetheless their hedonic reactions are quite different to the same sweetened beverage.