Flavors prime processing of affectively congruent food words and non-food words

The aim of this study was to explore the use of oral flavor stimuli in an implicit measure of attitudes; the affective priming paradigm. Unpleasant (cold instant coffee) and pleasant (strawberry lemonade) chemosensory flavor stimuli were used as primes in an affective cross-modal priming paradigm. Target stimuli were food words and non-food words, that were either affectively positive or negative, thus creating affectively congruent and incongruent prime–target pairs. We observed priming for congruent flavor–word pairs, i.e. if prime and target are both positive or both negative, this led to faster evaluation of the target words than for incongruent flavor–word pairs. Furthermore, the size of the priming effect was similar for food and non-food target words, suggesting that the affective priming effect is not augmented by the use of words that are semantically related. These results provide proof of concept of indirectly measuring attitudes to flavors with the affective priming paradigm, which may provide information on attitudes in addition to explicit pleasantness ratings.