cepts (e.g., “funeral”). In the current four studies (total N = 357), we examined this metaphoric association by having participants come up with a taste word when reading an emotion and emotion-laden word (Study 1—explicit association of taste words-to-emotion/emotion-laden words), come up with an emotion word when reading taste words (Study 2—explicit association of emotion words-to-taste words), rate the association between taste words and basic or non-basic emotion words (Study 3), and rate the association between taste words and a more expanded pool of emotion/emotion-laden words (Study 4). Results showed that sweet was mostly associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas bitter, followed by sour and spicy, was mostly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words. The bidirectionality of taste–emotion metaphoric association was supported by our dataset. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and embodied cognition are discussed. Keywords: taste, emotion, emotion-laden words, emotion words, conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition Introduction Metaphor, a figure of speech in linguistics, is used to describe a concept by another apparently unrelated concept, e.g., “ Jealous is sour/bitter ” ( Yu, 1998 ). However, according to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 ; Landau et al., 2010 ), metaphors are not only a linguistic phenomenon, but can also reflect how abstract concepts are associated with more concrete, physically embodied concepts. In the present study, we examine how emotion is metaphorically associated with taste. Specifically, we refer the “taste–emotion association” to the association between taste words and emotional words. We focus on the word association, rather than the association with gustatory experience or induced/measured emotion. Following the definition of Sutton and Altarriba (2016) , emotional words refer to both emotion words (i.e., words for emotion st