Are you 'crazy' for gin? You might just be a psychopath...

A study done by researchers at Innsbruck University in Austria has found that those who prefer bitter drink and food - like G&Ts, dark chocolate, radishes and coffee - are more likely to have psychopathic tendencies.

In a study of 500 people, researchers had respondents rank how much they liked various food and drink items on a six-point scale. Later, they had the respondents answer how much the agreed or disagreed with certain statements like "I enjoy tormenting people" or "given enough provocation, I may hit someone."

What they found was that people who agreed with these types of statements had tendencies to display narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and everyday sadism. And if that isn't creepy enough, they repeated the study with 450 MORE respondents, and found the same results. Eek!

So what gives for this correlation between bitter foods and psychopathic tendencies? The author of the study, Christina Sagioglou, explains that it's got a lot to do with the everyday sadism.

“We found particularly robust correlations with everyday sadism . . . [which is] a construct related to benign masochism—the enjoyment of painful activities,” the researches say.

Most people are put off by bitter tastes, as they generally indicate poisonous foods in the wild. Those with sadistic tendencies, however, may get some sort of thrill from this effect and be more attracted to bitter foods.

But it's not all bad news for us gin and tonic-loving 'psychopaths' - apparently, other personality traits uncovered by the study included intelligence, assertion, the ability to stay calm under pressure and a natural sort of optimism.

Well... we can raise our G&T glasses to that!