Your choice of chocolate can reveal much about your personality, including your preferences in bed, psychologists argue.

According to Murray Langham, a New Zealand psychotherapist and author of the book Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Self, the choice of a chocolate's shape and filling, as well as how its wrapping is disposed of, reveals much about people's personality traits and moods.

Milk chocolate lovers, for example, tend to be innocent people who like to live in the past. Fans of dark chocolate, on the other hand, are materialistic, problem solvers who are excited by the future. White chocolate aficionados have an innate sense of fairness and believe they have the power of the universe at their command.

Langham says he had his idea after noticing that many of his patients enjoyed a close relationship with chocolate.

"I started asking my clients what sort of chocolates they like to eat," he said, "and I began to notice that people chose similar confectionery according to their personality."

Langham says he found that by observing his patients' chocolate habits he could discover more about their personalities than by just asking the patients straightforward questions about themselves, as psychologists tend to do in regular therapy.

Langham, who says his best-selling book has attracted widespread interest among American psychotherapists, says the choice of filling and shape also reveals much about one's personality and state of mind.

Oval-shaped lovers, for instance, are social and sensual. Those who prefer a coffee filling are open-minded, but also impatient, anxious and immature.

A perhaps more controversial aspect of "Chocolate Therapy" also holds that the way a chocolate's wrapper is disposed of brings out people's attitudes about sex.

Those who crinkle the wrapping before throwing it away tend to have too many thoughts on their mind and are unable to concentrate in bed. People who roll it into a ball, on the other hand, are having a boring sex life.

(China Daily May 5, 2004)