Why people drink shampoo? Food Imitating Products are fooling brains and endangering consumers for marketing purposes

Avoiding unintentional injuries from household chemicals: Comparing the appeal to children from the perspectives of children, caregivers, and experts

This study investigated whether caregivers and regulatory experts can predict the appeal of household chemicals for children and explored determinants of differences between adults' and children's child-appeal rating. We invited N = 95 4-year-old children and their caregivers to a laboratory study. Both independently ranked 16 household chemicals from the least to the most child-appealing product. In addition to the laboratory study, we sent an online adaptation of this ranking task to N = 46 experts involved in the monitoring and authorizing of household chemicals. Our findings show that the aggregated child-appeal rating of household chemicals was highly similar among caregivers, experts, and children. When comparing child-appeal ratings of household chemicals with and without child-appealing images, caregivers and experts did well in predicting which products might appeal to children. Finally, our findings show that the similarity between individual caregivers' and their own children's child-appeal ratings of household chemicals varied substantially. To conclude, although adults can assess the general child-appeal of household chemicals, they need to consider that the actual appeal of a household chemical can vary considerably among individual children. Instead of regulating specific product attributes, policymakers should prioritize educating caregivers about pitfalls and misconceptions that hinder effective injury prevention.

Childhood poisonings: Effects of ambiguous product characteristics on preschool children's categorization of household chemicals

This study investigated preschool children's categorization and risk perception of products with ambiguous product characteristics (e.g., food-like packaging). These characteristics make it difficult for preschool children to categorize household chemicals correctly. This, therefore, increases the risk of unintentional poisoning. We hypothesized that ambiguity arises from different product characteristics, such as the type of packaging, the products' scent, or the packaging's color and transparency. In four behavioral tasks, N = 108 preschool children (M = 43 months, SD = 3) categorized different products and household chemicals with various types of packaging, colors, and scents. Individually wrapped dishwasher tablets were more likely to be categorized as edible than unwrapped ones. Furthermore, children who had interacted with any type of dishwasher tablet in the last 6 months performed better in identifying dishwasher tablets, regardless of packaging type. Household chemicals with a fruity scent were more likely to be categorized as drinkable than those with a chlorine scent. Finally, the children considered black bottles more dangerous and preferred them less than bottles of a different color. In contrast, bottle transparency generally did not seem to affect risk perception and preference. These findings confirm that ambiguous product characteristics influence children's categorization of unknown products and, thus, their risk perception and decision-making. Manufacturers and caregivers are advised to reduce the ambiguity of household chemicals by designing more neutral product packaging and choosing products with more neutral elements, respectively.

Biocidal products: Opportunities in risk assessment, management, and communication

In the coronavirus disease 2019 era, biocidal products are increasingly used for controlling harmful organisms, including microorganisms. However, assuring safety against adverse health effects is a critical issue from a public health standpoint. This study aimed to provide an overview of key aspects of risk assessment, management, and communication that ensure the safety of biocidal active ingredients and products. The inherent characteristics of biocidal products make them effective against pests and pathogens; however, they also possess potential toxicities. Therefore, public awareness regarding both the beneficial and potential adverse effects of biocidal products needs to be increased. Biocidal active ingredients and products are regulated under specific laws: the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act for the United States; the European Union (EU) Biocidal Products Regulation for the EU; and the Consumer Chemical Products and Biocide Safety Management Act for the Republic of Korea. Risk management also needs to consider the evidence of enhanced sensitivity to toxicities in individuals with chronic diseases, given the increased prevalence of these conditions in the population. This is particularly important for post-marketing safety assessments of biocidal products. Risk communication conveys information, including potential risks and risk-reduction measures, aimed at managing or controlling health or environmental risks. Taken together, the collaborative effort of stakeholders in risk assessment, management, and communication strategies is critical to ensuring the safety of biocidal products sold in the market as these strategies are constantly evolving.

Protecting the children -a virtual reality experiment on consumers' risk perceptions of household chemicals

Warnings on the labels of hazardous household chemicals (e.g. warning pictograms and use instructions) should create risk awareness and thus encourage safe storage, handling and disposal. However, scientific findings have called into question the effectiveness of warnings to prevent accidents, albeit mostly based on consumers' self-reports. This study aimed to contribute to existing data on household chemicals and consumer safety by applying a novel observational method using virtual reality (VR). The study participants (N = 119) were observed after receiving a task to childproof a virtual apartment from various interactable neutral and hazardous objects (i.e. knives, lighters and household chemicals with and without warnings) that were placed in the virtual apartment. For the analysis, the object placement (i.e. accessible or inaccessible to the children) and the level of interaction with the objects were coded, and the observational data were supplemented with data gathered through a questionnaire. The results showed that most hazardous household chemicals were moved to spots that were inaccessible to the children without any interactions of the participants with the warnings. Instead, they used their pre-existing knowledge and intuitive strategies to judge the objects' risks. These potentially misleading intuitive strategies should be increasingly considered in the regulation of hazardous household chemicals. This study also discussed the use and limitations of VR for the observation of human behaviour and decision making under uncertainty.

Neural correlates of food labels on brand, nature, and nutrition: An fMRI meta-analysis

Eating is an essential act of our everyday life, and it involves complicated cognitive appraisal and gustatory evaluation. This study meta-analyzed the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies about food labels on brand, nature and nutrition. Web of Science Core Collection (WoS), Scopus, and PubMed were queried to identify human fMRI studies written in English and published in peer-reviewed journals and used taste or food related labels. Studies were excluded if they reported no results from taste/food related stimuli versus control, no task-based fMRI results, or no results from whole-brain analysis. Nineteen studies entered the analysis. Results for the meta-analysis on food nutrition revealed that the precuneus on the right hemisphere was significantly activated, a brain region related to internal mentation of self-consciousness and nutritional evaluation. Results for the overall analysis on all 19 studies, the analysis on food brand, and the analysis on food nature revealed no significant brain regions. Food nutrition labels were generally processed by brain regions related to internal mentation of self-consciousness and nutritional evaluation. However, the neural correlates of labels of food brand and food nature were inconsistent across studies. More future studies are needed to better understand the cognitive processing of different kinds of food labels in our brain.

Seeing household chemicals through the eyes of children-Investigating influential factors of preschoolers' perception and behavior

INTRODUCTION

Children who encounter household chemicals run the risk of unintentional injury. The aim of this study was to understand which factors heighten children's attention or misguide their decision-making concerning household chemicals. We hypothesized that certain product attributes (i.e., label, packaging, closure types), storage context, and parental beliefs play a role in this setting.

METHOD

We conducted a laboratory study with N = 114 children (M = 45 months, SD = 6.5) and their parents (M = 38 years, SD = 4.92). Children completed a series of behavioral tasks in which they had to choose between products with different attributes, identify products in different storage contexts, and sort household chemicals.

RESULTS

The results confirmed that the children preferred products with cartoon-style labels compared to products without such labels. However, children's decision-making did not differ for products with different closure types (child-resistant vs sprayer-type closures). Regarding the storage context, our results showed that the children particularly struggled to identify dishwashing tabs when they were stored with other food items rather than household chemicals. In terms of parental beliefs, our study found that parents rated more household chemicals as child-safe than their children did.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION

Parents should buy household chemicals with neutral labels and pay attention to how their household chemicals are stored. Manufacturers should consider potential adverse effects when developing new product designs.

Consumers' decision-making process when choosing potentially risky, frequently used chemical household products: The case of laundry detergents

Chemical household products are a common cause of accidents in the domestic sphere. Despite such products being associated with certain risks in the event of swallowing or contact with the skin or eyes, they are used in nearly every household worldwide for hygiene purposes. In most European countries, chemical household products feature warnings of the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) as well as other warnings. In this eye-tracking study (N = 147), which was conducted in a virtual environment, we examined (i) whether consumers use such warnings when choosing a laundry detergent, (ii) whether they consider information irrelevant to risk assessment and (iii) whether they make use of this information for their final product choice. For this, the participants were split randomly into three experimental groups (a risk priming group, an effectiveness priming group, and a control group) that each received different tasks while purchasing a laundry detergent. The results indicate that the warnings found on laundry detergents are effective when they are used, although the majority of consumers do not look at the warnings. Therefore, we suggest that the alternative placement of warnings or the use of simplified warnings should be considered to improve consumers' awareness of potential risks.

The influence of packaging on consumers' risk perception of chemical household products

Chemical household products are found in most households. If consumers are to safely handle such products, they need to be aware of the risks posed by the particular product they are using. Although most countries require that chemical household products feature warning labels (e.g. the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals), consumers appear to also use other cues to determine the risks associated with a specific product. Thus, we studied the influence of packaging on consumers' risk perception of chemical household products. More specifically, we examined the effect of the colour of the packaging (black or pink packaging versus the original packaging) as well as the presence of images of flowers or food-imitating elements on the packaging. Significant differences with regard to consumer's risk perception were found in terms of all four studied manipulations. Therefore, we conclude that consumers' risk perception can be influenced by the packaging design. In particular, if elements that lower consumer's risk perception (e.g. featuring flowers on the label and food-imitating elements on the packaging) are omitted from the packaging, consumers might be able to more accurately judge the risks associated with a product and so take appropriate safety precautions.

The peak of health: The vertical representation of healthy food

As expressed by the "Healthy is Up" metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory argues that the representation of health is commonly associated with high verticality because, typically, people stay upright when they are healthy whereas illness may force them to lie down. Along this line of argument, this research is the first to empirically explore the metaphorical representation of healthy food in terms of verticality. Across five experiments (N = 714), this article first demonstrates that people are faster to pair healthy food with up than down in an implicit association test (Study 1, supporting a metaphorical congruency effect). Then, it shows that people associate healthy food with high verticality and unhealthy food with low verticality by placing healthy food up high and unhealthy food low down along the vertical axis, and by preferring a food pyramid that depicts healthy food at the top rather than at the bottom (Studies 2a, 2b and 3, supporting an abstract-to-concrete effect). Last, this research finds that people judge a food product as healthier when it is pictured from an upward-looking angle than when it is pictured from a downward-looking angle (Study 4, supporting a concrete-to-abstract effect). Further analyses test the interaction between individual differences in self-control and the effects of the "Healthy is Up" metaphor in Studies 2a, 2b, 3 and 4. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.

Extrinsic Factors Underlying Food Valuation in the Human Brain

Subjective values for food rewards guide our dietary choices. There is growing evidence that value signals are constructed in the brain by integrating multiple types of information about flavor, taste, and nutritional attributes of the foods. However, much less is known about the influence of food-extrinsic factors such as labels, brands, prices, and packaging designs. In this mini-review article, we outline recent findings in decision neuroscience, consumer psychology, and food science about the effect of extrinsic factors on food value computations in the human brain. To date, studies have demonstrated that, while the integrated value signal is encoded in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, information on the extrinsic factors of the food is encoded in diverse brain regions previously implicated in a wide range of functions: cognitive control, memory, emotion and reward processing. We suggest that a comprehensive understanding of food valuation requires elucidation of the mechanisms behind integrating extrinsic factors in the brain to compute an overall subjective value signal.

Consumers' perceptions of chemical household products and the associated risks

Accidents with chemical household products are prevalent worldwide and often involve young children. Previous research has shown that consumers use both analytical factors (e.g., warning symbols) and potentially misleading heuristics to evaluate the riskiness. However, it remains unclear whether consumers intuitively think of the specific risks of these products when handling them. We conducted an online survey with Swiss consumers (N = 1109) aiming to investigate consumer's spontaneous and prompted risk perception of chemical household products. First, we asked them about their free associations to laundry detergent, descaler, mold remover and essential oils. While participants were aware of the risks when prompted about them, they did not name them intuitively, but mainly thought of the possible uses and attributes of the product. Next, we examined prerequisites to safe handling of chemical household products. This included applied knowledge about the products, but also factors like perceived barriers to safe use. Finally, we assessed the predictors of perceived severity of accidents in order to estimate the potential behavioral changes that these predictors might elicit. For interventions, particular attention should be accorded to personal risk awareness and the perception of potential barriers, which were significantly related to the perceived severity of accidents.

"Chemophobia" Today: Consumers' Knowledge and Perceptions of Chemicals

This mixed-methods study investigated consumers' knowledge of chemicals in terms of basic principles of toxicology and then related this knowledge, in addition to other factors, to their fear of chemical substances (i.e., chemophobia). Both qualitative interviews and a large-scale online survey were conducted in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. A Mokken scale was developed to measure laypeople's toxicological knowledge. The results indicate that most laypeople are unaware of the similarities between natural and synthetic chemicals in terms of certain toxicological principles. Furthermore, their associations with the term "chemical substances" and the self-reported affect prompted by these associations are mostly negative. The results also suggest that knowledge of basic principles of toxicology, self-reported affect evoked by the term "chemical substances," risk-benefit perceptions concerning synthetic chemicals, and trust in regulation processes are all negatively associated with chemophobia, while general health concerns are positively related to chemophobia. Thus, to enhance informed consumer decisionmaking, it might be necessary to tackle the stigmatization of the term "chemical substances" as well as address and clarify prevalent misconceptions.

Taste at first (person) sight: Visual perspective modulates brain activity implicitly associated with viewing unhealthy but not healthy foods

Every day, people are exposed to images of appetizing foods that can lead to high-calorie intake and contribute to overweight and obesity. Research has documented that manipulating the visual perspective from which eating is viewed helps resist temptation by altering the appraisal of unhealthy foods. However, the neural basis of this effect has not yet been examined using neuroimaging methods. Moreover, it is not known whether the benefits of this strategy can be observed when people, especially overweight, are not explicitly asked to imagine themselves eating. Last, it remains to be investigated if visual perspective could be used to promote healthy foods. The present work manipulated camera angles and tested whether visual perspective modulates activity in brain regions associated with taste and reward processing while participants watch videos featuring a hand grasping (unhealthy or healthy) foods from a plate during functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI). The plate was filmed from the perspective of the participant (first-person perspective; 1PP), or from a frontal view as if watching someone else eating (third-person perspective; 3PP). Our findings reveal that merely viewing unhealthy food cues from a 1PP (vs. 3PP) increases activity in brain regions that underlie representations of rewarding (appetitive) experiences (amygdala) and food intake (superior parietal gyrus). Additionally, our results show that ventral striatal activity is positively correlated with body mass index (BMI) during exposure to unhealthy foods from a 1PP (vs. 3PP). These findings suggest that unhealthy foods should be promoted through third-person (video) images to weaken the reward associated with their simulated consumption, especially amongst overweight people. It appears however that, as such, manipulating visual perspective fails to enhance the perception of healthy foods. Their promotion thus requires complementary solutions.

Basic taste processing recruits bilateral anteroventral and middle dorsal insulae: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of fMRI studies

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Numerous task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have reported the locations of basic taste representations in the human brain, but they usually employed a limited number of subjects (<20) with different methodologies and stimuli. Moreover, the reported brain regions were sometimes inconsistent. Thus, we aimed at performing a meta-analysis of the published data to identify locations consistently activated across studies, and performed a connectivity analysis to reveal how these taste processing regions connect with other brain regions.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A meta-analysis was performed based on 34 experiments, with 238 total participants in 16 studies, to establish the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) of taste-mediated regional activation. Meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) and data stored in BrainMap database were employed to reveal the functional connectivity of the regions identified by ALE with other brain regions, across all types of experiments that caused activation among healthy subjects.

RESULTS

ALE identified nine activated clusters in bilateral anteroventral and middle dorsal insulae, bilateral thalamus and caudate, bilateral pre-/postcentral gyrus, and right hippocampus. The concurrence between studies was moderate, with at best 38% of experiments contributed to the significant clusters activated by taste stimulation. Sweet taste was the predominant contributing taste. MACM revealed that at least 50% of the nine clusters coactivated with the middle cingulate cortex, medial frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and putamen.

CONCLUSION

Results suggested that fMRI studies have reported reproducible patterns of activations across studies. The basic taste stimulations resulted in activations in a mostly bilateral network. Moreover, they were connected with cognitive and emotional relevant brain regions.

Consumers' Risk Perception of Household Cleaning and Washing Products

A large share of accidental and nonaccidental poisonings are caused by household cleaning and washing products, such as drain cleaner or laundry detergent. The main goal of this article was to investigate consumers' risk perception and misconceptions of a variety of cleaning and washing products in order to inform future risk communication efforts. For this, a sorting task including 33 commonly available household cleaning and washing products was implemented. A total of 60 female consumers were asked to place the cleaning and washing products on a reference line 3 m in length with the poles "dangerous" and "not dangerous." The gathered data were analyzed qualitatively and by means of multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and linear regression. The dimensionality of the sorting data suggests that both analytically (i.e., written and graphical hazard notes and perceived effectiveness) and intuitively driven risk judgments (i.e., eco vs. regular products) were applied by the participants. Furthermore, results suggest the presence of misconceptions, particularly related to consumers' perceptions of eco cleaning products, which were generally regarded as safer than their regular counterparts. Future risk communication should aim at dispelling these misconceptions and promoting accurate risk perceptions of particular household cleaning and washing products.

Neuroscience-Inspired Design: From Academic Neuromarketing to Commercially Relevant Research

Companies and organizations the world over wish to understand, predict, and ultimately change the behavior of those whom they interact with, advise, or else provide services for: be it the accident-prone driver out on the roads, the shopper bombarded by a myriad of alternative products on the supermarket shelf, or the growing proportion of the population who are clinically obese. The hope is that by understanding more about the mind, using recent advances in neuroscience, more effective interventions can be designed. But just what insights can a neuroscience-inspired approach offer over-and-above more traditional, not to mention contemporary, behavioral methods? This article focuses on three key areas: neuroergonomics, neuromarketing, and neurogastronomy. The utility of the neuroscience-inspired approach is illustrated with a number of concrete real-world examples. Practical challenges with commercial neuromarketing research, including the cost, timing, ethics/legality and access to scanners (in certain countries), and the limited ecological validity of the situations in which people are typically tested are also discussed. This commentary highlights a number of the key challenges associated with translating academic neuroscience research into commercial neuromarketing applications.

Health and Pleasure in Consumers' Dietary Food Choices: Individual Differences in the Brain's Value System

Taking into account how people value the healthiness and tastiness of food at both the behavioral and brain levels may help to better understand and address overweight and obesity-related issues. Here, we investigate whether brain activity in those areas involved in self-control may increase significantly when individuals with a high body-mass index (BMI) focus their attention on the taste rather than on the health benefits related to healthy food choices. Under such conditions, BMI is positively correlated with both the neural responses to healthy food choices in those brain areas associated with gustation (insula), reward value (orbitofrontal cortex), and self-control (inferior frontal gyrus), and with the percent of healthy food choices. By contrast, when attention is directed towards health benefits, BMI is negatively correlated with neural activity in gustatory and reward-related brain areas (insula, inferior frontal operculum). Taken together, these findings suggest that those individuals with a high BMI do not necessarily have reduced capacities for self-control but that they may be facilitated by external cues that direct their attention toward the tastiness of healthy food. Thus, promoting the taste of healthy food in communication campaigns and/or food packaging may lead to more successful self-control and healthy food behaviors for consumers with a higher BMI, an issue which needs to be further researched.

Assessing the Role of Shape and Label in the Misleading Packaging of Food Imitating Products: From Empirical Evidence to Policy Recommendation

Food imitating products are chemical consumer items used frequently in the household for cleaning and personal hygiene (e.g., bleach, soap, and shampoo), which resemble food products. Their containers replicate elements of food package design such as possessing a shape close in style to drinking product containers or bearing labels that depict colorful fruits. In marketing, these incongruent forms are designed to increase the appeal of functional products, leading to chemical consumer product embellishment. However, due to the resulting visual ambiguity, food imitating products may expose consumers to the risk of being poisoned from ingestion. Thus, from a public health perspective, food imitating products are considered dangerous chemical products that should not be sold, and may merit being recalled for the safety of consumers. To help policymakers address the hazardous presence of food imitating products, the purpose of this article is to identify the specific design features that generate most ambiguity for the consumer, and therefore increase the likelihood of confusion with foodstuffs. Among the visual elements of food packaging, the two most important features (shape and label) are manipulated in a series of three lab studies combining six Implicit Association Tests (IATs) and two explicit measures on products' drinkability and safety. IATs were administered to assess consumers' implicit association of liquid products with tastiness in a within-subject design in which the participants (N = 122) were presented with two kinds of food imitating products with a drink shape or drink label compared with drinks (experiential products with congruent form) and classic chemical products (hygiene products) (functional products with congruent form). Results show that chemical consumer products with incongruent drink shapes (but not drink labels) as an element of food package design are both implicitly associated with tastiness and explicitly judged as safe and drinkable. These results require confirmation in other studies involving different shapes and labels. Notwithstanding, due to the misleading effect of this ambiguity, public health authorities are thus well advised to focus their market surveillance on chemical products emulating a food or drink shape.

The sweetest thing: the influence of angularity, symmetry, and the number of elements on shape-valence and shape-taste matches

A within-participants experiment was conducted in two countries (the UK and Colombia) in order to investigate the matching of shapes to taste words. Comparing the two countries allowed us to explore some of the cultural differences that have been reported thus far solely in terms of people's visual preferences. In particular, we addressed the question of whether properties other than angularity influence shape-valence and shape-taste matching (crossmodal correspondences). The participants in the present study repeatedly matched eight shapes, varying in terms of their angularity, symmetry, and number of elements to one of two words—pleasant or unpleasant and sweet or sour. Participants' choices, as well as the latency of their responses, and their hand movements, were evaluated. The participants were more likely to judge those shapes that were rounder, symmetrical, and those shapes that had fewer elements as both pleasant and sweet. Those shapes that were more angular, asymmetrical, and that had a greater number of elements, were more likely to be judged as both unpleasant and sour instead. The evidence presented here therefore suggests that aside from angularity and roundness, both symmetry/asymmetry and the number of elements present in a shape also influence valence and taste categorizations.