Consumer Emotions in Food Experience
Summary
Emotions play a pivotal role in shaping the sensory and cognitive dimensions of food experience, influencing not only momentary pleasure but also long-term dietary choices and health outcomes. Consumer affect arises from a complex interplay between intrinsic food properties—such as taste, texture and aroma—and extrinsic cues, including packaging, labelling and contextual narratives. Emotional responses comprise rapid, often unconscious physiological reactions mediated by the autonomic nervous system, and slower, reflective appraisals that contribute to conscious liking and decision making. Advances in biometric monitoring have revealed the temporal unfolding of affective states, while self-report tools offer insight into valence and arousal dynamics that predict choice better than liking alone. Beyond laboratory settings, immersive and narrative technologies are extending the reach of food emotion research into digital and virtual environments. Taken together, this body of work underscores the global significance of affective science for product development, dietary interventions and personalised nutrition, and highlights the need for integrated measurement frameworks that capture the full spectrum of consumer emotions in real-world contexts.
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Consumer Emotions in Food Experience publication trend
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Technical terms
Valence: The pleasantness–unpleasantness dimension of an emotional response, ranging from positive (pleasure) to negative (displeasure).
Arousal: The intensity of emotional activation, from calm or low energy to excited or high energy states.
Mixed reality: An immersive technology that blends virtual elements with the physical environment to heighten sensory engagement and emotional impact.
Check-All-That-Apply (CATA): A self-report method in which participants select all emotion or attribute terms that describe their response to a food stimulus at a given moment.
References
- Emotional responses to narrative content: A comparative study on consumer food choice intentions. Computers in Human Behavior (2024).
- How Flavorsome Was That Movie? Using a Bayesian Network Approach to Understand How Audiovisual Stimuli Influence Emotions and Flavor Perception. Food Frontiers (2025).
- Methods for Evaluating Emotions Evoked by Food Experiences: A Literature Review. Frontiers in Psychology (2018).
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