A review of measurement and relationships between food, eating behavior and emotion

• Emotions are elicited by food.
• Emotions are associated with eating behavior and purchase intent of foods.
• Sensory, food type, psychological state and experience associate with emotional response to food.
• Lexicons/measurement method of emotions elicited by food are important for representative data.

Emotions evoked by products mainly enhance the pleasure of buying, owning, and using them. More recently, food-elicited emotion is increasingly becoming critical for product differentiation as many food products are produced with similar characteristics, packaging, and price. Attempts to measure emotions have been done in the psychology and sociology fields, but measurement of food-elicited emotions is more recent and not well established. This review paper discusses emotion lexicon development, measurement of food-elicited emotions, some factors affecting emotional responses to foods, how emotions affect eating behavior, and how this information can be utilized for marketing and increasing acceptability of foods.