Development of an emoji polarity scale for food-evoked emotions evaluation
Emojis have been introduced in consumer science, revealing a huge potential to measure consumers’ emotional associations with food products. For this purpose, the present work aimed to develop a set of emoji scales based on a semantic differential approach, using pairs of emojis of opposing polarity (valence). Using the lists of emojis previously developed by Godoy, N. et al. (2021), two panels of 100 children (6-17 years old) and 100 adults (18-40 years old) were recruited and invited to pair antagonistic pairs of emoji pictures freely. Subsequently, each participant identified the emoji with a positive connotation to better categorise their choice. Later, with the same panels, the two ballots were independently applied to evaluate five commercial fruit juices on the market. Overall liking was also evaluated, following a balanced sequential monadic presentation. Firstly, the emoji pairs were compiled on a co-occurrence matrix, and an Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) approach was used to validate the emojis that co-occur. Since the goal was to achieve a polarity scale, an Euclidian distance based on the valence and arousal values defined by Rodrigues et al. (2017) for the Portuguese population was also calculated. The paring of the emojis followed a heuristic based on the AHC analysis, co-occurrence value and Euclidian distances. After the AHC analysis, the analysed results focused exclusively on emoji pairs with co-occurrence values greater than 10% of the sample size (n co-occurrence ≥ 10) and showed that from a list of 25 emoji, children consensually identified eight pairs with a large distance value, and adults to a list of ten pairs, from a list of 27 emoji. Both ballots yield a good degree of discrimination, as shown in the images below, with the samples with higher overall liking scores most correlated with the emoji in the positive polarity.
Acknowledgements: Authors thank the project "cLabel+: Alimentos inovadores “clean label” naturais, nutritivos e orientados para o consumidor” (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-046080), funded by COMPETE2020, Portugal2020, Lisboa2020 e FEDER. Authors Barbosa, B., Rocha, C., Cunha, L.M. are thankful to national funds via FCT through GreenUPorto’s Strategic Projects UIDB/05748/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/05748/2020) and UIDP/05748/2020.
Publish date 2024-09-07
Author(s) Bruna Barbosa; Célia Rocha; Ana Catarina Pinto; Rui Costa Lima; Luís Miguel Cunha
