Characterizing Emotional Response to Olfactory, Auditory, and Visual Stimulations in a Virtual Reality Environment

Food stimuli are multisensorial. Eating a particular type of food is associated with a specific sound, odor, taste, color, form, texture, etc., that allows people to enjoy the diversity of the meals. The understanding of consumers’ emotional experiences requires the study of each sensory component, isolated from each other’s or combined, in different contexts and conditions. Virtual reality recent development offers a unique tool allowing the complete and highly controlled study of human sensory experiences. It bridges the gap between real-life and laboratory investigations and provides rich and adjustable environments that can be combined with the increasing number of methods measuring emotional processes. The protocol presented here was developed to investigate implicit behavioral and physiological emotional responses to emotional olfactory, auditory, and visual stimuli delivered in a rich virtual environment. It was developed without any reference to food consumption behavior but can be easily transferable to all kinds of stimuli.