Food-evoked emotions are essential for consumers’ food choice prediction and market success. These food-evoked emotions are predominantly measured by explicit self-reports. Yet in certain situations such as social desirability, explicit measures might not reflect one’s true emotional experience. The additional use of implicit measures can be beneficial.
The present study investigated whether social pressure truly changes food experience by means of explicit and implicit measures of food liking. Explicit ratings were EmojiGrid valence and arousal ratings in response to familiar and unfamiliar food images and soups. Implicit measures consisted of frontal alpha asymmetry during pre-selected scenes of a movie about Japanese soy sauce as well as sip size of the soup. Explicit and implicit measures were compared to assess the effect of social pressure on Japanese and Dutch food liking.
No differences between the social pressure (n = 19) and control group (n = 23) emerged in any of the measures. Explicit ratings and the implicit measure sip size, but not frontal alpha asymmetry during watching the movie, showed differences between participants with high and low food neophobia. The insensitivity of frontal alpha asymmetry to food neophobia groups could be explained by the movie scenes showing rather familiar foods. BMI grouping similarly showed no effect on frontal alpha asymmetry during watching the movie, but also explicit measures were unaffected.
It was concluded that the social pressure intervention itself was not effective in inducing increased liking of Japanese food, since there was no increase in neither reported liking nor ‘true’ liking. Additional ways to induce social pressure, e.g., observation during rating, are advisable if the study was repeated. Furthermore, the use of stronger stimuli to induce approach or avoidance motivation as measured by frontal alpha asymmetry, is recommended. It cannot be concluded whether social pressure truly affects food experience.