Lemon Test: Are You An Introvert Or An Extrovert?
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was the first author to include the “introversion / extraversion” dimension in his factorial personality model. In addition, he developed numerous personality tests to evaluate the dimensions of his model. Can you imagine Eysenck’s face when he found out, after having created many tests, that one of “its” dimensions can be measured with a few drops of juice, as the lemon test does?
You can do this test easily at home. You only need a cotton swab (ear swab), a piece of string and a little lemon juice. It will take you a couple of minutes. And not only can it tell you if you are an introvert or an extrovert, but it is also able to define your degree of empathy!
How to perform the lemon test
The first thing you should do is take the cotton bud and tie the thread in the middle, to be able to suspend it in the air. Once this is done, support one of its ends for twenty seconds on your tongue. Next, put five drops of lemon juice on your tongue and swallow. Then rest the other end of the swab on your tongue for another twenty seconds.
The next thing you have to do is, when you take it out of your mouth, keep it suspended in the air holding by the thread. It is about seeing which of the two extremes weighs more. The swab will likely twist and you end up messing with which end you put before and after the juice. My advice is that, before starting, make a mark of a different color on each of the ends.
When suspending the swab in the air, two things can happen: that the end of the swab that you supported after adding the juice droplets weighs more and the swab is tilted; or, on the contrary, that it remains horizontal. If it stays horizontal, it means that you are outgoing. However, if the swab is tilted towards the wet end after the juice, it means that you are introverted.
Interpretation of the results for the introversion / extraversion dimension
What does it mean if the juice side weighs more? It means that you have salivated more at the lemon juice than an extrovert. But let’s see why this happens.
Eysenck believed that one of the basic differences between introverts and extroverts is found at the physiological level, at the baseline level of cortical activation. He considered that extroverts have a chronically low level of cortical activation and that, therefore, they seek high intensity stimulation to compensate for their low activation. In addition, they tend to respond less intensely to stimuli.
On the contrary, the basal activation of introverts, according to Eysenck, is higher, and for this reason they prefer quieter or solitary activities and softer stimuli to keep their high activation “at bay”. Introverts tend to respond more intensely to stimuli. This is what he called the cortical activation theory.
Translating it to lemon and to understand ourselves: let’s consider lemon juice as a medium intensity stimulus. An extrovert, faced with a stimulus of medium intensity, will not experience great activation, that is, he will not salivate much, since he needs more powerful stimulations. On the other hand, an introvert will tend to respond much more intensely by salivating more than an extrovert.
The explanation seems logical. Later investigations did demonstrate this tendency of introverts to react more intensely than extroverts to certain sensory stimuli. However, it was not possible to show that they had a higher basal cortical activation level than extroverts.
So, if you thought that a lemon was going to reveal great secrets about your personality, you were wrong, just like its famous creator. What it can do is show how sensitive you are to stimuli and how intensely you respond to them.
What can the lemon test tell us about our level of empathy?
At the University of Zurich (Switzerland) they conducted an experiment to measure the degree of empathy of people. The experiment consisted of watching videos with some cotton wool inside the mouth. In one of the videos, the protagonist was doing an exercise of moving colored balls from one place to another. In the other video, the protagonist appeared cutting a lemon and eating it.
The results showed, firstly, that the participants salivated more while watching the video in which the subject eats the lemon. This occurs by “autonomic resonance”, which is basically the tendency to imitate, in an unconscious and automatic way, the physiological states of other people.
This ability is determined by the activity of our magnificent mirror neurons, an activity that goes far beyond making us yawn when others yawn.
Second, they discovered, not only that we salivate more when we see another person eat, but also that we do not all do it with the same intensity. More empathetic people salivated more than less empathetic people.
Doing the experiment on your own would not make much sense, since there is no standard amount of saliva that an empathic person emits. But you could do it with other people to compare the results. You may be surprised!
For the curious …
At the beginning of the article, I invited you to imagine Eysenck’s face when he met this test that few professionals give validity. Well, the most curious thing is that it was Eysenck himself and his wife Sybil who, in 1960, carried out this test for the first time. Although the truth is that they used a little more “professional” materials.
The objective of the test was to verify the theory of cortical activation, which is precisely what explains why the lemon test works.
As we have seen, the lemon test is not going to reveal our deepest secrets, but it can give us clues about how sensitive we are, both to a stimulus and to the physiological states of the people we observe or have around us. I invite you to do the experiment and see if what your saliva says is similar to what you think of yourself.
