Use of event-related potentials to measure the impact of front-of-package labels on food-evoked emotion

Front-of-pack labelling (FoPL) systems are essential nutrition policy tools that can help consumers identify when food products contain an excessive amount of critical nutrients, such as sugars, saturated/trans fats, and sodium. FoPL systems can modify consumer behaviour by decreasing consumers’ desire to purchase such products. Emotions significantly influence consumers’ purchase decisions; thus, research on the performance of FoPL systems should measure emotions. However, measuring emotional responses to food may be challenging because the dimensional aspects of emotions can be difficult to verbalize. The emotional content of visual stimuli, such as food, activates brain responses that can be assessed using the event-related potential technique (ERP), in which brain responses to specific stimuli are extracted from the electroencephalographic brain signal. In this review, we address how and why the ERP would help answer questions about the impact of FoPL systems on food-evoked emotions. We hope that this review bridges the fields of neuroscience and consumer food research and provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research.