Determinants and predictive validity of direct and indirect measures of recently acquired food attitudes

The present study examined whether the affective priming paradigm in the picture–picture naming task can be used to measure recently acquired food attitudes. Food (dis)likes were induced by an evaluative learning procedure in which real food items were contingently paired with sensory liking or expected consequences information. It was found that the picture–picture naming task is capable of measuring recently induced food attitudes irrespective of whether they were based on sensory liking or expected consequences information. In addition, we observed that affective priming effects that are obtained with the naming task can be used to predict food-related choice behaviour, irrespective of whether participants are given time to elaborate on their choice or not. The latter finding, however, emerged only when food attitudes were based on sensory liking.