Impact of emotional state on consumers' emotional conceptualizations of dark chocolate using an emoji-based questionnaire

An increasing focus on emotion in consumer and sensory research has led to the development of many instruments to capture consumers' emotions elicited by food, with a growing interest in the use of emoji in recent years. While emoji are considered a suitable tool to assess food-evoked emotions, it is still unclear to what extent consumers' emotional state impacts the measurements. This study explored product-emotion associations within a single product category (dark chocolate) and assessed the effect of emotional state on the emotional profiling of chocolate using 33 facial emoji with RATA questions. The study involved 146 adult participants (mean age: 25.5 +/- 5.4). Emotional state influenced the emotional conceptualization of some chocolate samples. Use of positive emoji was associated with a positive emotional state, and a similar positive correlation was found between negative/neutral emotional state and the valence related to emoji use. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that the emotional state only impacted emotional responses of the same valence, e.g. a positive emotional state was only correlated with positive emotions and a positive emotional state was not able to decrease negative emotional responses evoked by chocolate. Further, only 5 out of 33 emoji discriminated significantly among the dark chocolate samples. This study showcases that including a measurement of emotional state when using emoji for emotional profiling can be of interest for framing the results and illustrates that emoji can discriminate between (equally-liked) products within the same product category.