Hedonic contrast and condensation: good stimuli make mediocre stimuli less good and less different.

Loud sounds make soft sounds softer (contrast) and also make them less discriminable (which we call condensation). We report on parallel phenomena in hedonics: Good stimuli reduce the pleasantness of less good stimuli, and also reduce people's preferences among the less good stimuli. In Experiment 1, subjects rated the pleasantness of fruit juices diluted to approximate hedonic neutrality.