Eat vanilla yogurt, be happy: Study
Being pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised by the taste of something can change a persons mood, according to research published in Food Research International. There is a growing conviction that emotional reactions to the consumption of foods or the perception of fragrances play an important role in the acceptance of products in the market.
However, it is not clear how to measure this reliably. Previous tests have had the disadvantage of being heavily language-based, of tending to suggest feelings that people might have but perhaps never did, and of fixating the respondents explicit attention on the food or the odor under consideration, rather than on implicitly expressing their feelings.
In the search for a simple method to measure implicit and unconscious emotional effects of food consumption, a team of researchers from the Netherlands, Austria and Finland, used four different techniques to measure peoples emotional responses, and to find out what emotional effects, if any, eating different yogurt had on people.
The team also looked at the sensory effect of the yogurts. There was no difference in the emotional responses to strawberry versus pineapple yogurts, but low-fat versions led to more positive emotional responses. Most strikingly, vanilla yogurt elicited a strong positive emotional response, supporting previous evidence that a subtle vanilla scent in places like hospital waiting rooms can reduce aggression and encourage relationships among patients and between patients and staff. The team found that eating vanilla yogurts made people feel happy and that yogurts with lower fat content gave people a stronger positive emotional response.
They also found that even if people reported differences in liking them, yogurts with different fruits did not show much difference in their emotional effect.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Jozina Mojet from the Netherlands, says: This kind of information could be very valuable to product manufacturers, giving them a glimpse into how we subconsciously respond to a product. We were surprised to find that by measuring emotions, we could get information about products independent from whether people like them.
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