On the psychological impact of food colour
By Charles Spence. Flavour, 2015
383 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink. To date, a large body of laboratory research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the colour of food and beverage items can exert a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations, and hence on the subsequent experiences, of consumers (or participants in the lab). However, should the colour not match the taste, then the result may well be a negatively valenced disconfirmation of expectation. Food colours can have rather different meanings and hence give rise to differing expectations, in different age groups, not to mention in different cultures. Genetic differences, such as in a person’s taster status, can also modulate the psychological impact of food colour on flavour perception. By gaining a better understanding of the sensory and hedonic expectations elicited by food colour in different groups of individuals, researchers are coming to understand more about why it is that what we see modulates the multisensory perception of flavour, as well as our appetitive and avoidance-related food behaviours.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sensory Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2536ce5d4842ee56423888c5c3a4359b6eb1e78
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Sensory Systems
Citations in the corpus
- On tasty colours and colourful tastes? Assessing, explaining, and utilizing crossmodal correspondences between colours and basic tastes (2015, neutral): “brighter and more saturated) colours (see [54, 55]).”
- Fifty shades of food: The influence of package color saturation on health and taste in consumer judgments (2020, background): “…is a plethora of research demonstrating that people tend to match certain colors with the basic tastes (i.e., sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami; see Spence et al., 2015 for a review) and that color helps people to correctly identify a food or drink's flavor (e.g., Garber, Hyatt, & Starr, 2000;…”