As you gear up to down a g&t or two during tonight's New Year's Eve celebrations, bear in mind what your tipple of choice may say about your personality.

A new study from Innsbruck University in Austria has revealed that people who enjoy bitter flavours like gin are more likely to exhibit antisocial personality traits including sadism, narcissism, psychoticism and Machiavellianism.

In the Austrian study, 953 people were asked to rank various types of food and drink with flavours ranging from bitter to sour, salty and sweet, on a six-point scale.

They were also asked questions related to personality which were designed to measure their levels of emotional stability and tendency towards everyday sadism.

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The two sets of results were compared and it showed that people who prefer bitter tasting food and drink like black coffee or gin also exhibited more antisocial tendencies.

Dr Christian Sagioglou and Dr Tobias Greitemeyer, who conducted the study, wrote, "The results of both studies confirmed the hypothesis that bitter taste preferences are positively associated with malevolent personality traits, with the most robust relation to everyday sadism and psychopathy.

"Regression analyses confirmed that this association holds when controlling for sweet, sour and salty taste preferences and that bitter taste preferences are the overall strongest predictor compared to the other taste preferences.

"The data thereby provide novel insights into the relationship between personality and the ubiquitous behaviours of eating drinking by consistently demonstrating a robust relation between increased enjoyment of bitter foods and heightened sadistic proclivities."

Given gin is the fastest-growing spirit drink in Ireland the results are a little worrying for Irish society.

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Online Editors