Touch sensitivity may affect taste

If given the choice between sipping your coffee out of a ceramic mug or a paper/plastic cup, then which would you choose?

If you chose the paper/plastic cup for any other reason than portability and fitting in your car's cup holder, then please enlighten me.

If you chose a ceramic mug, then it's likely you prefer to have a hold on something heavy and sturdy, right?

There may another reason to choose a thick-walled cup over a thin one, marketing professors Aradhna Krishna and Maureen Morrin have found: taste.

In a study to be published in April's issue of Journal of Consumer Research, 1,000 college students were blind-folded and given water to drink from sturdy and flimsy cups. Many of them gave harsher evaluations of the taste of the water from flimsy cups. These harsh evaluators were students with a low sensitivity to touch. Students who a high sensitivity to touch weren't as likely to have taste be influenced by the kind of cup they sipped out of.

People with a high sensitivity to touch tend to be better evaluators of noting when touch is important or not, like when you're sipping coffee. Touch-sensitive people are those of us who get so much satisfaction out of feeling silk, leather or similarly textured items, can't stand itchy wool sweaters and cut out labels/tags from clothing.