The Influence of Emotion-Oriented Extrinsic Visual and Auditory Cues on Coffee Perception: A Virtual Reality Experiment

Eating is a process that involves all senses. Recent research has shown that both food-intrinsic and extrinsic sensory factors play a role in the taste of the food we consume. Moreover, many studies have explored the relationship between emotional state and taste perception, where certain emotional states have been shown to alter the perception of basic tastes. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the design of eating environments which take into account both sensory attributes as well as their emotional associations. Here, we used virtual reality to study the effect of colours and music, with specific emotional associations, on the evaluation of cold brew coffee. Based on an online study (N=76), two colours and two pieces of music with similar emotional arousal but opposing valence ratings were chosen to produce a total of eight virtual coloured environments. Forty participants were recruited for the on-site experiment, which consisted of three blocks. First, a blind tasting of four coffee samples (0%, 2.5%, 5%, 7.5% sucrose) was carried out. Next, participants experienced the eight environments via an HTC Vive Pro headset and evaluated their expected liking, sweetness and bitterness of a mug of coffee presented in VR. Finally, they tasted identical 5% coffee samples in the same eight environments. Results revealed One of the key findings of this study that, when only one factor (colour or music) was manipulated, background colour significantly influenced coffee liking. When colour and music were used in combination, however, we found an overall effect of music valence on coffee sweetness, as well as an interaction effect of colour and music on liking. These results reinforce the importance of the extrinsic sensory and emotion factors on food expectations and liking. Overall, these results are in line with previous research , where positive emotions can lead to increased food liking and higher sweetness compared to negative emotions.