The who, what, where, when, why and how of measuring emotional response to food. A systematic review

Traditional consumer acceptance and preference testing rarely predicts food choice behaviour accurately. Increased interest in focusing on the total consumer experience, examining the relationship between the food and the consumer, and understanding that emotional processing drives human actions has led to the development of several instruments to capture consumer response beyond hedonic liking. This review aimed to identify and provide a comprehensive overview of the tools that have been used to measure emotion, implicitly and explicitly, in relation to food in the context of food behaviour. A second aim was to highlight the relative merits of key methodologies, research gaps and, based on the review findings, provide some recommendations for selecting food-evoked emotional response measures. The studies were assessed qualitatively using a 2 level (implicit, explicit) × 3 level (cognitive, behavioural, physiological) categorisation framework to conduct an exhaustive overview of measures used in current research. A total of 193 peer-reviewed studies evaluating consumer emotional response to food [published January 1997-March 2021] were identified, classified, and reviewed. Particularly, the why, when, what, where, who, and how of measuring food evoked emotion was discussed. No one “go-to” method to measure consumer emotional responses was evident and the optimal approach remains unknown. Several studies highlighted that, in principle, combining multiple measures would provide a clearer multidimensional insight into consumer emotional responses influencing consumer food choice behaviour. However, a clear gap remains in research investigating how emotional responses contribute to formulate better sensory experience and/or predict food choice.