Methods to assess food-evoked emotion across cultures

Traditionally, consumer science groups and food companies use self-report measures, in which people indicate how much they like a certain food after having tasted it, to predict consumers’ future buying behaviors. However, it has been suggested that food-evoked emotion may improve prediction of individuals’ food choice. It may reveal previously unknown product attributes that go beyond traditional sensory and acceptability measurements, and can be a valuable source of information for product development and marketing. Although many research groups acknowledge that the evaluation of food-evoked emotions is probably important to predict food choice behavior, and although many different emotion-association questionnaires and measures have been developed and used, it is still unclear how to best assess food-evoked emotions.

This thesis investigated what (type of) measures are used to evaluate food-evoked emotions and to what extent these measures are able to capture food-evoked emotions. Also, we explored the added value of the different measures and their combination, all of these specifically in a cross-cultural context, where the same foods can be either novel or familiar, and where measures other than explicit, verbal measures are expected to be especially valuable. A new cross-cultural food image database and pictorial emotional response tool were developed. This thesis contributed to the methodology to more comprehensively and reliably measure food related emotions in crosscultural contexts. To achieve the goals, this thesis consists of two sections, ‘Measures to evaluate food-evoked emotion’ and ‘Measures of food-evoked emotion in cross-cultural context’.