RESUMEN
This paper applied a self-administered survey to investigate the impact of organic food behavior and the intention-behavior gap in organic food consumption (OIBG) on consumers' subjective wellbeing including physical, emotional, social and intellectual dimensions. The survey was carried out with 385 consumers. Furthermore, the study conducted a food test to explore the different impacts of organic and conventional food samples on the mental and physical conditions of consumers' wellbeing applying a psychological questionnaire. The food test took place in a sensory lab with a panel of 63 untrained German consumers. The research findings demonstrated a positive impact of the organic food consumption on consumers' subjective wellbeing, while no negative impact of OIBG has been perceived. Moreover, during the food test, consumers distinguished no differences between the impact of organic and conventional stimuli on their mental and physical status. Understanding how consumers perceive the impact of organic food consumption on their wellbeing is one important aspect. However, in the interest of narrowing the OIBG, it is more important to understand how consumers perceive the impact of this gap on their daily-life wellbeing.
RESUMEN
Emotions represent a major driver behind a consumption behavior. It may provide more important information beyond consumers' preferences. This study contributes to a better understanding of the discrepancy in emotion attitudes towards organic versus conventional food using a cognitive survey and real food consumption experience. An emotional profiling under informed and uninformed condition, a cognitive survey, and a rapid forced-choice test were carried out with 46 consumers. Our work detected a yawning gap in consumers' declared emotion attitudes in the cognitive survey and elicited emotion attitudes in the food consumption experience. Results showed that consumers exaggerate their positive emotion attitudes towards organic over conventional and their negative emotion attitudes towards conventional over organic. Even though consumers expressed higher negative emotion attitudes towards conventional food than organic in a cognitive survey, during the emotional profiling they had nearly equal emotion attitudes towards both conventional and organic samples. Moreover, positive declared emotions in a cognitive survey formed a good predictor of the final choice of conventional products over organic under time pressure. However, preferences, declared emotion, as well as elicited emotion attitudes were less useful as predictors of organic choice under time pressure. These results show the importance of taking into consideration the type of applied method when investigating consumers' emotion attitudes towards organic and conventional products.
RESUMEN
Studying consumers' implicit emotions has been always described as a difficult and a complicated mission due to the emotions being of a non-cognitive nature. This research aims to develop a new method based on emotion-color association (ECA) to detect consumer's implicit food-elicited emotions using an eye-tracker tool. The study was accomplished in two experiments. The first experiment intended to build a new color scale based on the emotion-color association using the eye-tracking method and a self-reported questionnaire (SRQ). The results showed that people tend to express their evoked positive emotions by choosing mostly the light colors, and favor to choose dark colors to reveal their evoked negative emotions. In the second experiment, a sensory evaluation was conducted employing the developed color scale in addition to verbal emotion-based questionnaire (VEQ) to detect the participants' food-elicited emotions with different samples. The sensory evaluation consisted of taste, smell, and vision tests. The study demonstrated a consistency between the results of the verbal emotion questionnaire and the new color scale method. This consistency may refer to the capability of the developed scale, as a non-intrusive method that obtains prompt responses and avoids deliberate action, to rapidly detect the implicit emotions in a sensory evaluation for a better understanding of the consumer's behavior.