From emotion to language: Application of a systematic, linguistic-based approach to design a food-associated emotion lexicon

• A novel approach for designing a food-associated emotion lexicon was developed.
• The systematic, linguistic-based method was applied to the German language.
• The final emotion lexicon contains differentiated and evaluative terms.
• The new list differs to some extent from preexisting lexicons.
• The approach and cultural aspects may influence the emotion lexicons.

In recent years, new emotion and feeling lexicons developed in different languages and cultures have led to interesting insights into food- and odor-elicited emotions. However, most of the applied methods were not very systematic and used preexisting word lists as a starting point. None of the lexicons was generated from a linguistic perspective using comprehensive actual language use data. The aim of the present two studies was to explore the nature of the most appropriate terms used to describe food-related emotions with a systematic, linguistic-based method. In the first study, we applied a novel, three-step approach to the German language by collecting actively used emotion words. The collection and identification step resulted in 272 candidate terms that have an emotional connotation. In an online survey, 222 German-speaking participants rated the relevance of these candidate words in relation to food products. The positive–negative–neutral categorization in the second study was aimed to characterize the 272 candidate words and to test for the occurrence of a hedonic asymmetry. The application of the novel approach in Study 1 was useful to identify 49 terms. The result indicates that German-speaking consumers actively use differentiated and evaluative words to describe food-evoked emotions. Up to 70% of these expressions were positive, confirming the occurrence of a hedonic asymmetry by means of a linguistic-based approach. The nature of our identified expressions differed, however, from preexisting lists, which may be attributed to divergences in the applied approaches or suggested cultural aspects. Overall, the novel, systematic and linguistic-based approach, and the designed German emotion lexicon tailored to the consumers’ active language use, are valuable tools to deepen our understanding of the role that emotions play in food consumption experiences.