Comparing Explicit and Implicit Measures for Assessing Cross-Cultural Food Experience.

Daisuke Kaneko,Anne-Marie Brouwer,Jan B F Van Erp,Anne J C Reuten,Ivo Stuldreher,Alexander Toet

doi:10.3389/fnrgo.2021.646280

Daisuke Kaneko, Anne-Marie Brouwer + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnrgo.2021.646280

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Abstract

The present study investigated the potential of implicit physiological measures to provide objective measures of affective food experience in contrast to explicit self-report ratings in a cross-cultural context. Dutch and Thai participants viewed 120 food images portraying universal food image categories (regular and molded food) and cultural food image categories (typically Dutch and Thai food). The universal food images were taken as ground truth high and low valence stimuli, where we assumed no genuine difference in affective experience between nationalities. In contrast, for the cultural food images, we did expect a genuine difference between nationalities. Participants were asked to rate valence, arousal and liking of each food image. In addition, heart rate (HR) and phasic electrodermal activity (EDA) responses to the images were recorded. Typically Asian and Western response biases were found for explicit ratings of regular and molded food with an extreme response style for Dutch, and a middle response style for Thai participants. However, such bias was not observed in HR. For cultural food image categories, HR showed the hypothesized interaction between participant nationality and food image category, reflecting the expected genuine difference between nationalities in affective food experience. Besides presenting participants with images, we also asked participants to taste typically Thai and Dutch drinks. Similar to images, a significant interaction between participant nationality and cultural food category was found for HR. An interaction was also found for sip size, while this was not seen in explicit measures. We attribute this to differences in the moment that these measures were taken. In this study, phasic EDA did not appear to be a sensitive measure of affective food experience, possibly since stimuli mostly differed in valence rather than arousal. To conclude, our study constitutes an example where cultural bias negatively affected the accuracy of self-reports, and only the implicit physiological measures followed the prior expectations of genuine food experience, indicating the potential of these measures to study cross-cultural food experience.

Highlights

To predict whether consumers will choose a certain food product, their emotional response when experiencing this product is considered to be an important predictor (Dalenberg et al, 2014; Gutjar et al, 2015; Köster and Mojet, 2015; Samant et al, 2017)
In the present study we investigated whether implicit physiological measures (HR and phasic electrodermal activity (EDA) recorded using traditional sensors) can contribute to comparing affective food experiences across cultures objectively without cultural response biases that affect explicit self-report methods
We examined implicit measures of food experience in a case that self-reported ratings cannot be taken at face value because of possible culturally dependent response bias

Summary

Introduction

To predict whether consumers will choose a certain food product, their emotional response when experiencing this product is considered to be an important predictor (Dalenberg et al, 2014; Gutjar et al, 2015; Köster and Mojet, 2015; Samant et al, 2017). The drawback of using explicit self-report questionnaires for assessing affective experience cross-culturally is that cultural background influences how people “self-report,” what emotional language they use, and how they use rating scales to describe their own food-evoked emotions (Meiselman, 2015; Van Zyl and Meiselman, 2015, 2016; Silva et al, 2016; Ares, 2018). Problems with translating between languages, and intercultural differences in terms of using rating scales, could potentially be overcome by implicit measures, which reflect fast, non-conscious, and uncontrollable responses (Soto et al, 2005; Lagast et al, 2017; Ares, 2018; Kaneko et al, 2018)

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