#Coffee snobs are just faking it, addiction study says

Your coffee is messing with your mind.

A study by addiction researchers has revealed that the beloved beverage is fooling drinkers into yearning, through the same modes of addiction as other drugs.

“Addiction can be characterized as a condition where increases in wanting are not met by concurrent increases in liking,” the researchers from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany wrote in their report, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology earlier this year.

Their study involved 56 students — 24 heavy drinkers, meaning they consume three or more cups per day, and 32 occasional or non-coffee-drinkers. Scientists surveyed participants with a series of images, asking them to divide pictures between those they found pleasant or unpleasant, which included comparisons between coffee and other drinks, as well as non-beverage-related face-offs, such as a skull and a puppy.

In each round, the keystroke for positive and negative responses remained the same, so researchers assume that someone who loves coffee would smash that like button as quickly as they do for other agreeable images.

They found this wasn’t the case.

“Habitual consumers of relatively high levels of coffee (at least three cups a day) differed from low/no coffee drinkers to a much stronger degree in wanting coffee,” study authors wrote — “wanting” being the operative word. When it came to actually liking coffee, answers from the coffee consumers and java abstainers differ far less.

“The current findings suggest that . . . caffeine shares crucial properties with other drugs,” according to the report.

“The main difference between highly addictive drugs (e.g., alcohol or cocaine) and substances with lower addictive strength (e.g., caffeine) may mainly be a quantitative rather than a qualitative one.”