8 Bizarre Things Science Has Taught Us About Sex

6. Everything Tastes Sweeter When You're In Love

They say love is the sweetest thing, but it turns out that this is actually, literally true.

In a 2013 study at the National University of Singapore, participants were split into groups and primed to either think about love, jealousy or a neutral subject.

To begin with, the groups were given some sweeties and asked to rank the flavour in terms of sweetness, sourness and bitterness. In a result that surprised precisely no one, they rated them mostly as sweet.

Now, it's probably not all that groundbreaking that sweets taste, er, sweet, but when the test was then repeated using distilled water, some more interesting results turned up.

Despite the fact that distilled water has virtually no flavour at all, those who were primed to think about love rated it as much sweeter that those who had written about jealousy or the neutral subject.

Interestingly, jealousy had no effect on the perception of bitterness, which would seem to indicate that the effect is more than just language based and runs a little deeper.

The researchers reckon that love must be more deeply embedded in our psyche, as a it is one of the first things that most of us experience as infants, whereas jealousy tends to be more fleeting. Isn't that heartwarming?