Emotions of Eating and Drinking

Abstract

The study of emotions has grown in the last 20 years from both the health orientation and the commercial product development orientation. The field continues to discuss the definition of emotion and the theory of emotions, both of which have implications on how to measure emotions, which is the main focus of this chapter. Emotion is usually defined as a rapid reaction to a stimulus, which could be a food or drink. Longer-term feelings are usually called moods. Existing emotion lists, in many languages, help the researcher to determine whether their method (questionnaire) contains real emotion words. Emotion questionnaires include some traditional ones from earlier days of emotion research to newer questionnaires often developed in the commercial product-development context. These questionnaires have produced a large number of research studies on food and drink products. One of the biggest challenges of emotion research is doing emotion research cross-culturally. This is especially true with questionnaires that use words; often the original research was done in English or another western language and then transported to another western country or to an Asian or other country. It is sometimes not clear whether the original emotion concept exists in the other country, and what words express that feeling - sometimes the emotion term does not clearly exist, and sometimes more than one word is used to express that feeling.