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Date

2016-08-11

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

PLos One
Creative Commons
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution 3.0 United States

Recently, several sets of standardized food pictures have been created, supplying both food images and their subjective evaluations. However, to date only the OLAF (Open Library of Affective Foods), a set of food images and ratings we developed in adolescents, has the specific purpose of studying emotions toward food. Moreover, some researchers have argued that food evaluations are not valid across individuals and groups, unless feelings toward food cues are compared with feelings toward intense experiences unrelated to food, that serve as benchmarks. Therefore the OLAF presented here, comprising a set of original food images and a group of standardized highly emotional pictures, is intended to provide valid between-group judgments in adults. Emotional images (erotica, mutilations, and neutrals from the International Affective Picture System/IAPS) additionally ensure that the affective ratings are consistent with emotion research. The OLAF depicts high-calorie sweet and savory foods and low-calorie fruits and vegetables, portraying foods within natural scenes matching the IAPS features. An adult sample evaluated both food and affective pictures in terms of pleasure, arousal, dominance, and food craving, following standardized affective rating procedures. The affective ratings for the emotional pictures corroborated previous findings, thus confirming the reliability of evaluations for the food images. Among the OLAF images, high-calorie sweet and savory foods elicited the greatest pleasure, although they elicited, as expected, less arousal than erotica. The observed patterns were consistent with research on emotions and confirmed the reliability of OLAF evaluations. The OLAF and affective pictures constitute a sound methodology to investigate emotions toward food within a wider motivational framework. The OLAF is freely accessible at digibug.ugr.es.

Description

The authors wish to thank Jaime Vila for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and Oscar Cervilla, Irene Forte, Alba Garrido, Laura Krutman, Lisa Mazzoni, and Teresa Mena for help with data collection and reduction.

Keywords

Vegetables,Emotions,Obesity,Adolescents,Eating disorders,Vision,Motivation,Research validity

Citation

Miccoli L, Delgado R, Guerra P, Versace F, Rodríguez-Ruiz S, Fernández-Santaella MC (2016) Affective Pictures and the Open Library of Affective Foods (OLAF): Tools to Investigate Emotions toward Food in Adults. PLoS ONE 11(8): e0158991. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158991

Related file

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0158991

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Sponsorship