Development of an Emotion Lexicon in Greek for the Self-Report and Measurement of Emotions Elicited by Foods

Abstract

Sensory linguistics and food science meet in the field of consumer studies. Glossaries of emotions and tools for measuring feelings related to food consumption are being developed in order to understand consumer preferences, and to gain insight to be used in consumer-focused product development and marketing. Although there are lexicons and tools for measuring emotions in various languages, there are none in Greek, leading to reduced competitiveness of Greek products and companies. As is the trend in cross-cultural studies, for the present study, an English emotion measurement tool was translated into Greek. The consumers with whom the translated tool was tested reported that many of the emotions contained were inappropriate for the task. Thus, the need to develop a lexicon in Greek from scratch was identified. Following the methodology for the development of the EsSense Profile an established commercial measurement tool, input from consumers was collected using questionnaires of various forms and for a variety of foods and beverages. Additionally, language sources were used for the development of the new Greek tool. The World Wide Web and Instagram were also used as linguistic resources, a practice that does not belong to standard methodology but follows the current literature. The new emotion lexicon was used as a measurement tool and compared with a broadly used measurement tool that contains emojis.

Keywords

• food
• consumers
• lexicon development
• emotion measurement
• EsSense Profile