MONDAY, Jan. 23, 2012 — You probably know what you would order for your last meal on Earth (a perfectly prepared steak? Great-Aunt Helen’s mac-n-cheese? Chocolate-covered gummy bears?). You’ve got your guest list nailed down (you’d invite your long-time best friend and Great-Aunt Helen, of course). And you even know which songs would be played as you dined (something that would make aunty Helen blush, we’re sure).

But have you ever wondered why we’re so obsessed with saving the best for last?

Actually, humans may be hardwired to view the “last” as “best,” according to a Huffington Post article about new research published in the journal Psychological Science. Phoebe Ellsworth, PhD, and Ed O'Brien, two scientists from the University of Michigan, were interested in whether we remember the end of an experience more fondly than the beginning and middle parts (say, the last semester of college; the last chapter in your favorite book; or the very last year you spent with Fido before he passed away). So to put their curiosity to the test, they had volunteers participate in a little experiment.

The participants were told that they’d be participating in a Hershey’s Kiss taste test. They didn’t know how many chocolates they’d be testing or which flavors they were tasting when (there were five flavors total: milk, dark, crème, caramel, and almond). At the end of the experiment, they were asked to indicate which Kiss was their favorite. But here’s the catch — for some of the participants, the researchers would say “Here is your next chocolate” before handing them another. However, others were told “Here is your last chocolate” when receiving the fifth.

The results: The Hershey’s-Kiss-critics who knew they were tasting their very last piece of chocolate tended to rate that one as their favorite — the participants who did not know which chocolate was the last did not rate their final bite nearly as positively.

Why were those final nibbles savored more than the others? “Simply identifying the ‘last’ chocolate as the ‘last’ made eating it more positive, and this emotion colored global judgments of enjoyment,” explained Wray Herbert, Phd, on Huffington Post.

How’s that for a happy ending?