Abstract
Would you get close to a stinky perfume bottle or to a loudspeaker producing noise? In this paper, we present two procedures that allowed us to assess the ability of auditory and olfactory cues to elicit automatic approach/avoidance reactions toward their sources. The procedures resulted from an adaptation of the Visual Approach/Avoidance by the Self Task (VAAST; Rougier et al., 2018), a task having the peculiarity of simulating approach/avoidance reactions by using visual feedback coming from the whole-body movements. In the auditory VAAST (Experiment 1), participants were instructed to move forward or backward from a loudspeaker that produced spoken words differentiated by their level of distortion and thus by their hedonic value. In the olfactory VAAST (Experiment 2), participants were asked to move forward or backward from a perfume bottle that delivered pleasant and unpleasant odors. We expected, consistent with the approach/avoidance compatibility effect, shorter latencies for approaching positive stimuli and avoiding negative stimuli. In both experiments, we found an effect of the quality of the emotional stimulus on forward actions of participants, with undistorted words and pleasant odors inducing faster forward movements compared with that for distorted words and unpleasant odors. Notably, our results further suggest that the VAAST can successfully be used with implicit instructions, i.e., without requiring participants to explicitly process the valence of the emotional stimulus (in Experiment 1) or even the emotional stimulus itself (in Experiment 2). The sensitivity of our procedures is analyzed and its potential in cross-modal and (contextualized) consumer research discussed.
Highlights
How can the hedonic value of a product be measured alone, without being simultaneously contaminated by something else? Most often, consumer judgments are collected by using direct measures
We aimed to provide further evidence concerning the ability of Visual Approach/Avoidance by the Self Task (VAAST) to measure approach/avoidance reactions for stimuli that differ in their hedonic value
For the remaining correct trials, reaction times (RTs) falling outside 2.5 SD from the mean of each participant computed for each experimental condition level were considered outliers and excluded from further analysis (0.9%)
Summary
Consumer judgments are collected by using direct measures (e.g., rating scales, questionnaires, or semi-directive interviews). Such methods proved their ability to discriminate products, they are subject to several biases. Many biases related to the way individuals use scales when quantifying their judgment have been reported, among which we mention contraction biases, centering biases, and logarithmic biases (for a review, see Poulton, 1989). To avoid such biases, it is necessary to use indirect measures that are likely to reflect the hedonic value of the product
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