Abstract
Our memories of past eating experiences are influential in shaping food preferences and consumption behavior, and the emotions that people associate to these memories are linked to their attitudes toward foods and their everyday food-related behaviors. This work studies the impact that food-related memories have on peoples’ emotional state and how this state is projected in a subsequent evaluation of images pertaining to food and food-related behaviors. Focus is placed on guilt and shame emotions. Through an online survey, three memories were investigated (a positive meal, a routine evening meal, and an overeating occasion) among UK consumers (N = 710). Participants primed with the overeating memory evaluated images related to junk food as conveying more feelings of guilt and shame than did participants primed with the memory of a positive meal. Moreover, this effect was moderated by participants’ dietary restraint status. Participants classified as having a high dietary restraint had stronger associations with the emotions guilt and shame than participants classified as low in dietary restraint. In contrast, a memory of a positive meal did not lead to positive valuations of any of the food-related images shown. Overall, the findings from the present study illustrate the partial impact that personal food memories have on consumers’ emotional response toward food-related issues, which in turn has the potential to affect future behavior. This study therefore contributes to the literature about cognitive effects on food attitudes and behavior. Furthermore, the results suggest that the empirical approach may be tapping into possibly unconscious emotions toward foods and food-related behavior.
Highlights
The measurement of consumers’ emotion-related responses toward foods and beverages has been intensively explored in recent years
The goal of this study was to investigate how memories linked to food can change our mood/emotional state, and how that emotional state, in turn, incidentally influences emotional judgements of food and food-related actions
Three different memory priming conditions were used with the expectation that participants would tend to evaluate the images of food/foodrelated actions in accordance with their prevailing emotional state as evoked by the memories
Summary
The measurement of consumers’ emotion-related responses toward foods and beverages has been intensively explored in recent years (see Köster and Mojet, 2015; Meiselman, 2015 for reviews) The premise driving this activity is that emotions and moods play an important role in consumer behavior (Gardner, 1985) at the point of purchase and in the subsequent consumer– product relationship (Batra et al, 2012). They explored whether the manipulation to increase remembered enjoyment resulted in participants choosing to eat more of a food as part of a later buffet lunch. Recent evidence suggests that episodic memory of food, or thoughts of future meals, suppresses subsequent food intake (Vartanian et al, 2016)
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