- Email: [email protected]
Rejoinder to commentaries on “Some considerations in the measurement of emotions in sensory and consumer research”
Food Quality and Preference 62 (2017) 376
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Food Quality and Preference journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual
Rejoinder to commentaries on “Some considerations in the measurement of emotions in sensory and consumer research”
MARK
John Prescott TasteMatters Research & Consulting, Sydney, Australia University of Florence, Italy
I would like to thank very much each of the experts on emotion that have written commentaries on my article. Each author has made important and insightful points about the article and about emotions (and their measurement) generally. I do not want to reply to their points individually, but merely to provide a couple of comments on my motivation for writing this article. As a regular attendee at sensory meetings for the past 25 years, I have watched a number of trends come and go. It became evident about 8–10 years ago that an interest in measuring emotions was developing. It became evident, too, that this interest arose out of the already long standing dissatisfaction with the predictive power of measuring liking/ acceptability/preference. Put simply, it appeared that sensory scientists were asking if something else, perhaps in addition to measures of liking, could increase our ability to predict actual food choices. In writing this article, I made an assumption that those in our field who were developing an interest in measuring emotions would probably keep up with those papers published in FQAP and other consumer product oriented journal and books, but might be unaware of the broader issues that had been (and continue to be) raised in psychology/affective science. My aim in writing the paper was not to be prescriptive, although it seems (from what the commentators have said) that I might have come down too strongly on the side of measuring valence and arousal instead of individual emotions. In summary, I do believe – we all believe – that there are such things as fear, anger, disappointment, joy, disgust, awe,
E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.05.014 Received 17 May 2017; Accepted 24 May 2017 0950-3293/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and so on. But it seems to me crucial to consider what each emotion term means. The recent research from Barrett and many others emphasizes the role of context in the production of the emotion itself. This, in turn, means that individuals’ differing responses to the context may produce different emotion outcomes. And this is before we even get to the question of each individual’s particular predisposition to experience varieties of emotion. It is easy to be seduced by the ease of measuring something, particularly if it produces nice relationships with other variables. Trust me, I know – I’ve done many studies on PROP perception. I can tell you how much I enjoyed my breakfast cereal this morning, but what does my response of “mild enjoyment” really mean? The academic literature will not, perhaps, give you the answer to this question, but it might inform you of the issues that you need to consider if you want to find out. My colleague Herb Meiselman chastises me for asking measures of emotions to be held up to a higher standard than measures of liking. He is quite right to do so. As he points out, being honest, we probably do not know what liking means, but that has not stopped it from being a useful measure in many respects. But that seems to me also the problem. It has been useful, but if we had a better grasp of what we were measuring, then its role in predicting food choice might be clearer. Perhaps we should examine our use of measures of liking for the past 50+ years and ask whether we want to be in the same situation with emotion measures in 50 years’ time.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Food Quality and Preference journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual
Rejoinder to commentaries on “Some considerations in the measurement of emotions in sensory and consumer research”
MARK
John Prescott TasteMatters Research & Consulting, Sydney, Australia University of Florence, Italy
I would like to thank very much each of the experts on emotion that have written commentaries on my article. Each author has made important and insightful points about the article and about emotions (and their measurement) generally. I do not want to reply to their points individually, but merely to provide a couple of comments on my motivation for writing this article. As a regular attendee at sensory meetings for the past 25 years, I have watched a number of trends come and go. It became evident about 8–10 years ago that an interest in measuring emotions was developing. It became evident, too, that this interest arose out of the already long standing dissatisfaction with the predictive power of measuring liking/ acceptability/preference. Put simply, it appeared that sensory scientists were asking if something else, perhaps in addition to measures of liking, could increase our ability to predict actual food choices. In writing this article, I made an assumption that those in our field who were developing an interest in measuring emotions would probably keep up with those papers published in FQAP and other consumer product oriented journal and books, but might be unaware of the broader issues that had been (and continue to be) raised in psychology/affective science. My aim in writing the paper was not to be prescriptive, although it seems (from what the commentators have said) that I might have come down too strongly on the side of measuring valence and arousal instead of individual emotions. In summary, I do believe – we all believe – that there are such things as fear, anger, disappointment, joy, disgust, awe,
E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.05.014 Received 17 May 2017; Accepted 24 May 2017 0950-3293/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and so on. But it seems to me crucial to consider what each emotion term means. The recent research from Barrett and many others emphasizes the role of context in the production of the emotion itself. This, in turn, means that individuals’ differing responses to the context may produce different emotion outcomes. And this is before we even get to the question of each individual’s particular predisposition to experience varieties of emotion. It is easy to be seduced by the ease of measuring something, particularly if it produces nice relationships with other variables. Trust me, I know – I’ve done many studies on PROP perception. I can tell you how much I enjoyed my breakfast cereal this morning, but what does my response of “mild enjoyment” really mean? The academic literature will not, perhaps, give you the answer to this question, but it might inform you of the issues that you need to consider if you want to find out. My colleague Herb Meiselman chastises me for asking measures of emotions to be held up to a higher standard than measures of liking. He is quite right to do so. As he points out, being honest, we probably do not know what liking means, but that has not stopped it from being a useful measure in many respects. But that seems to me also the problem. It has been useful, but if we had a better grasp of what we were measuring, then its role in predicting food choice might be clearer. Perhaps we should examine our use of measures of liking for the past 50+ years and ask whether we want to be in the same situation with emotion measures in 50 years’ time.