A team of scholars recently looked at what emotional effects - if any - eating different yogurts had on people.

Their article in Food Research International claims that being pleasantly surprised or disappointed with a food product can actually change a person's mood, at least based on emotional responses. Eating vanilla yogurt made people feel happy, and that yogurt with lower fat content gave people a stronger positive emotional response. Yogurt with different fruits did not show much difference in their emotional effect.

How did the scholars know? They used an unvalidated method called emotive projection, which involved showing study participants photographs of other people and asking them to rate the people in the photographs on six positive and six negative traits. The idea behind the test is that people project their emotions onto others, so their judgment of others could indicate their own mood.

Three groups of at least 24 participants were each given a pair of yogurt to taste. The pairs of yogurts were of the same brand and were marketed in the same way, but had different flavors or fat content. The team then tested their emotions using four methods, including the new emotive projection test. The results revealed that liking or being familiar with a product had no effect on a person's emotion. However, changes in whether they liked it after tasting the yogurt did: being pleasantly surprised or disappointed about the food influenced people's moods.

The team also looked at the sensory effect of the yogurts. There was no difference in the emotional responses to strawberry versus pineapple yogurts, but low-fat versions led to more positive emotional responses. Most strikingly, vanilla yogurt elicited a strong positive emotional response, supporting previous evidence that a subtle vanilla scent in places like hospital waiting rooms can reduce aggression and encourage relationships among patients and between patients and staff.

The authors suggest that the new method could be an effective way to gather information about a product before taking it to market. Traditionally, products have been tested using explicit methods - directly asking people how they feel. In contrast, the new method is implicit and therefore not controlled by people's conscious thought.

Of course, it's also impossible to verify, but so is a lot of marketing.

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