Characterizing emotional response to olfactory, auditory and visual stimulations in a virtual reality environment

Food stimuli are multisensorial: eating potato chips is associated with a particular sound, odor, taste, color, form, texture, etc. The understanding of consumer emotional experience requires the study of each sensory component isolated from each other’s or combined, in different contexts and conditions. Virtual reality recent development offered a unique tool allowing the complete and highly controlled study of consumer experience. It bridges the gap between real-life and laboratory investigations by providing rich, complete and adjustable environment that can be combined with the increasing number of methods developed to measure psychological, behavioral and physiological effects of emotion. The protocol presented here was developed to investigate implicit behavioral and physiological emotional responses related to the encountering of emotional olfactory, auditory and visual stimuli in a rich virtual environment. It was developed without any reference to food consumption behavior but can be easily transferable to all kind of stimuli