Coffee is a good idea, according to science

According to the NCA 2019 National Coffee Drinking Trends report, consumers confess that they drink coffee to increase the focus on their daily jobs. In addition, a new research from the University of Toronto, in Canada, says that people can get a similar psychological effect even without drinking it.

“Coffee is one of the most popular beverages and a lot is known about its physical effects,” said Sam Maglio, an associate professor from the University of Toronto. “People often encounter coffee-related cues, or think about coffee, without actually ingesting it,” Maglio added.

Sam Maglio is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment to the Marketing area at the Rotman School of Management.

He conducts research at the interface of cognition, motivation, and emotion, with an emphasis on implications for consumer behaviour. Specifically, he studies how situational cues shape consumer thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as conditions that help people to mentally transcend such contexts.

“We wanted to see if there was an association between coffee and arousal such that if we simply exposed people to coffee-related cues, their physiological arousal would increase, as it would if they had actually drank coffee”, explained Maglio about the research called Coffee cues elevate arousal and reduce level of construal.

In this kind of psychological research, the word arousal refers to the reactions of certain areas of the brain get activated from some stimulation. “People who experience physiological arousal, in this case as the result of priming and not drinking coffee itself, see the world in more specific, detailed terms,” says Maglio.

However, the participants coming from eastern culture showed a low level arousal from the coffee stimulations and the researchers from the University of Toronto concluded that this is because that part of the group lived in places where the coffee culture dominance is not strong.

University of Toronto. (2019, March 27). Just seeing reminders of coffee can stimulate the brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 29, 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190327164713.htm