Enhancing the Conceptualization and Measurement of Implicit and Explicit Affective Evaluations: A Case Study in Disordered Eating

Photograph Based Evaluation of Consumer Expectation on Healthiness, Fullness, and Acceptance of Sandwiches as Convenience Food

Sandwiches are the most common “casual-food” consumed by all age groups in Spain. Due to the importance of visual appearance to promote unplanned or impulse buying, foodservice and hospitality companies focus on improving the visual impression of their food menus to create an expectation that satisfies both sensory and hedonic consumer experiences. To provide a list of attributes about the visual appearance of sandwiches, 25 students were recruited from a university and were invited to participate in two nominal group technique (NGT) sessions. To understand whether a sandwiches’ appearance can influence the expectation of consumers, 259 participants completed an online survey specially designed from the results of the NGT sessions. Data were analyzed using conjoint, internal preference mapping and cluster analysis; the interaction effect by gender was also studied. The conjoint results indicate that visual perception about the filling (vegetal or pork based) plays the most key role overall in consumer expectation. When consumers choose vegetables as the filling, the consumers’ perceived sandwiches as healthier, but the pork filling was perceived as more attractive and satiating. Interaction effect by gender was observed in filling when females perceived pork filling as less healthy than vegetable. By acceptance, consumers were segmented into three groups. The first cluster (n = 80) selected the pork filling. The smaller group (cluster 3, n = 36) prioritized the vegetal filling, and the most numerous cluster 2 (n = 140) liked sandwiches with multigrain bread. These results may help companies to build tailor-made marketing strategies to satisfy consumer segments.

Valence and arousal-based affective evaluations of foods

We investigated the nutrient-specific and individual-specific validity of dual-process models of valenced and arousal-based affective evaluations of foods across the disordered eating spectrum. 283 undergraduate women provided implicit and explicit valence and arousal-based evaluations of 120 food photos with known nutritional information on structurally similar indirect and direct affect misattribution procedures (AMP; Payne et al., 2005, 2008), and completed questionnaires assessing body mass index (BMI), hunger, restriction, and binge eating. Nomothetically, added fat and added sugar enhance evaluations of foods. Idiographically, hunger and binge eating enhance activation, whereas BMI and restriction enhance pleasantness. Added fat is salient for women who are heavier, hungrier, or who restrict; added sugar is influential for less hungry women. Restriction relates only to valence, whereas binge eating relates only to arousal. Findings are similar across implicit and explicit affective evaluations, albeit stronger for explicit, providing modest support for dual-process models of affective evaluation of foods.