Emoji em um contexto relacionado a alimentos e emoções

Abstract

Emotional responses to food and drink have been established as an important research topic within sensory and consumer science. The present research contributes to the growing body of research on the use of emojis in sensory and consumer research, with new insights into consumers' spontaneous expressions of food-related emotional experiences. The overall objective was to explore emojis in a food-related context, so the study was divided into two stages. i) Explore the meaning of emojis through the Whatsapp application in a context related to emotions and sensory attributes of chocolates with different characteristics. The results show that the participants had no difficulty in using emojis to express their emotions and determine the chocolates' characteristic attributes. Emojis demonstrate positively for use in the description of emotions, being mainly related to the feeling of joy. Attributes were associated with different emojis, and the same emoji was associated with different characteristics. ii) Through an online questionnaire, emojis could be associated with the description of the five basic tastes. Bitter taste was associated with 18 emojis with different emotional expressions, sweet and salty taste showed great similarity in the group of emojis that were used to be characterized. Umami and acid, on the other hand, were mostly classified by emojis named discontent and dissatisfaction. Regarding food emojis, cheese was the most associated with umami and carrot was the emoji with the lowest connection. This study is the first to explore emojis in relation to the association with basic tastes, so it is concluded that emojis can be a possibility for description in relation to basic tastes, consumers did not have difficulty in associating emojis. Emojis are increasingly being used to communicate emotional expressions on electronic equipment, representing a relevant source of information for consumer companies about consumer attitudes and behaviors related to food. However, given that emojis convey a wide range of meanings, a deep understanding of how consumers interpret them is required to enable their use in food-related consumer research.