The development of an emotion lexicon for the coffee drinking experience

Consumer products are perceived via sensory aspects that stimulate emotional responses. A small number of emotion lexicons for food have been developed, and these emotion instruments for general consumption experience might not uncover the deeper and distinct emotions created by specific products, especially those consumed primarily for pleasure (e.g., coffee). The objective of this study was to develop an emotion lexicon that could be used to identify and describe feelings that occur during coffee drinking. In the first part of the study, focus groups of coffee drinkers were held to generate emotion terms related to coffee drinking. The terms generated were further refined by 48 coffee drinkers using check-all-that-apply scale with two coffee samples. The final list comprised of 86 items, 47 generated by coffee drinkers and 39 terms from the Essence Profile® (King & Meiselman, 2010). In the second part, six coffees were tested with 94 consumers using the developed lexicon. The emotion questionnaire was administered twice — before and during coffee drinking on a 5-point scale. Overall acceptability of the samples was also asked in the study. The consumers were clustered into 6 clusters using the overall acceptability scores. Stepwise regression analysis with forward selection was done on the entire data set, by each consumer cluster, and by each coffee sample to identify the important emotion terms, which resulted in the selection of 44 emotion terms out of which 17 terms were from the Essence Profile®. It is evident that a complex product like coffee may need a specific emotion lexicon to uncover more information about how different coffee samples impact emotional responses in diverse coffee drinkers.