Humans are not only hardwired to associate love with sweetness, but they even perceive the things they eat and drink as sweeter when they think about romance, according to a study by the University of Singapore.

Researchers hypothesize the increased sweetness could have to do with the shared neural reward circuitry associated with experiencing both love and sweetness.

The study, published in the journal Emotion, conducted four experiments on different groups of volunteers, Real Clear Science reported.

The first experiment, researchers asked participants to rate how emotions like love and jealousy related to different tastes, like sweet, spicy, sour, bitter, and salty.

In a second experiment, subjects were asked to give at least two answers to the question: "If love were a taste, what would it be?"

In both experiments, participants paired love with sweetness, while jealousy was most often coupled with sourness and bitterness.

For the third experiment, a group of people were primed to feel either love or jealousy before eating sweet and sour candy and bittersweet chocolate samples. Some were asked to write about a personal experience with romantic love, while others were asked to write about experiencing romantic jealousy. A control group wrote essays on landmarks in Singapore. Then they rated the taste of their treats.

People who wrote about love rated their samples as sweeter than the jealousy or landmark groups. The jealousy group didn't find their candy more bitter or sour, despite the correlation in the questionnaires in the first tests.

And in a fourth experiment, volunteers who had been encouraged to feel love rated water as sweeter than those who had been encouraged to feel either jealousy or happiness.

According to lead researcher Kai Qin Chan, the reason we associate love with sweetness might have to do with how the brain is wired.

"It is possible that when one experiences love, the anterior cingulate cortex would activate representations associated with sweetness, thereby eliciting sweetness sensations even without actual sweetness input," Chan said.

The anterior cingulate cortex plays a role in decision making, empathy, understanding emotion, error detection, awareness and anticipating rewards.

According to Salon, studies have found the anterior cingulate cortex, is activated by looking at pictures of romantic partners and by tasting sugar.