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This paper aims to examine the effect of proximal (versus distant) depiction of food products within an advertising or online context on consumer responses across food types (indulgent versus non-indulgent) and display formats that lead to a single exposure (e.g. billboard) versus multiple exposures (e.g. online menu).

Five experimental studies, using both implicit and explicit elicitation techniques, demonstrate the effect of proximal food depictions. The paper rules out alternative explanations (portion-size perception and participants’ bodily distance) and controls for several other factors (e.g. visual crowding, body-mass index, dietary restrictions, etc.)

The studies find that proximal food pictures are implicitly associated with tastiness more for indulgent (vs non-indulgent) foods; lead to higher purchase intention for indulgent food upon a single exposure driven by enhanced perceived tastiness; and evoke satiation upon multiple exposures.

This research identifies the effect of spatial proximity of food depiction on consumer responses using different stimuli. Future work could explore the effects in alternate consummatory contexts.

The findings provide clear instructions to marketers and policymakers on how to tailor consumer responses using spatial distance in depiction of food products, depending on the food type and display format. Understanding the effect of visual food cues will help policymakers devise strategies to counter over-consumption, which increases the risk of non-communicable diseases and reduces consumer well-being (SDG 3, United Nations).

Introducing a novel pictorial cue (i.e. the spatial distance of product depiction), this paper contributes insights to the literature on implicit associations, visual information processing, satiation, over-consumption and food marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to build upon reward-learning theory and examine the role of indulgent food consumption and habitual eating behaviors as a means of emotional coping.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods were enlisted to explore emotional eating and indulgent tendencies. In Phase 1 of this research, participants responded to open-ended questions regarding the drivers of emotional eating. In Phase 2, a theoretically driven model was developed from Phase 1 findings and quantitative data was collected to test it.

Phase 1 findings indicate that negative terms such as “stressed” and “distract” were more prevalent in the high emotional coping group as opposed to the low emotional coping group. Building from Phase 1, findings from Phase 2 demonstrate a link between emotional eating and indulgent food consumption, underscoring the impact of habitual behaviors. Specifically, emotional coping frequency fully explains the relationship between emotional eating habits and indulgent eating frequency, while intentions to eat indulgent foods partially mediates the relationship between attitude toward indulgent foods and indulgent food consumption frequency. In addition, intentions to eat indulgent foods partially mediates the relationship between emotional coping frequency and indulgent food consumption frequency.

Social marketing efforts can be enlisted to de-market fatty foods to individuals prone to engaging in emotional eating. Individuals might also be encouraged to use emotion regulation techniques to help manage negative emotions.

This research contributes to the existing marketing and consumer well-being literature by exploring the role of habit formation in the development of emotional eating and indulgent food consumption.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate consumer-generated images (CGI), or images of products and experiences that are produced and controlled by consumers, particularly in the food domain, and the influence that producing such images has on the consumer creating the image.

The authors present three studies that manipulate the type of food (indulgent vs healthy) and whether participants create CGI prior to consumption. Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and PROCESS.

It is shown that producing CGI causes a momentary active delay in consumption, which increases the savoring associated with consumption of pleasurable (i.e. indulgent) foods and, in effect, increases attitudes and taste evaluations of the experience when consumption actually takes place. When descriptive social norms regarding healthy eating are made salient, CGI can also lead to more favorable outcomes for less pleasurable (i.e. healthy) foods.

The findings provide insight into the effects of consumers taking pictures of their food before consumption, a growing trend on social media sites (i.e. Instagram). Marketing managers can develop strategies to encourage their consumers to take pictures of their food.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate the effects of consumer-generated images on a product consumption experience and identify the conditions and process under which these effects occur.

This paper aims to examine how repeated exposure to health-related products that contain flavors (e.g. cherry-flavored cough syrup) create “flavor halos” that can bias perceptions about the healthfulness of foods that contain the same flavors (e.g. cherry-flavored cheesecake).

Six experiments, using both between- and within-subjects designs, explore the effects of flavor halos in hypothetical and actual consumption settings. They test the underlying mechanism, rule out competing explanations and identify an opportunity to correct the cognitive biases created by flavor halos.

Flavor halos can be created via repeated exposure to flavored medicinal products in the marketplace. These flavor halos bias dieters’ judgments about the healthfulness of vice foods containing such flavors. Dieters are motivated toward a directional conclusion about food healthfulness to mediate the guilt associated with consuming indulgent products. Providing dieters with corrective information mitigates these effects.

The authors examine one way flavor halos are created –via repeated exposure to flavored medicinal products. Future research should explore other ways flavor halos are created and other ways to mitigate their effects.

Considering the prevalence of obesity, organizations striving to help consumers pursue health goals (e.g. weight watchers) can use flavors to improve dietary compliance. Health-care organizations can help consumers understand and correct the cognitive biases associated with flavor halos.

By identifying flavor halos, this work adds to the literature investigating how flavors influence consumers’ judgments about healthfulness. The results suggest dieters apply flavor halos as they engage in motivated reasoning to license their indulgent desires.

This study aims to explore the phenomenon of visceral food pleasure, described as a unitary experience that, after an initial sense of pleasure and relief generated by the satisfaction of eating impulses, is followed by negative feelings – such as guilt and worry – linked to the consumption of hedonic or unhealthy foods.

An exploratory approach has been adopted. In particular, the critical incident technique among 87 individuals has been used to extract insights about visceral food pleasure.

Contrary to previous research results, this study shows that viscearl food pleasure is not a unitary phenomenon, identifying four types of different facets, two of which have a negative valence in terms of felt emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being (i.e. the “greedy” and the “maladaptive” experiences). More importantly, the other two facets are associated with positive consequences in terms of emotions felt post-consumption and perceived psychological well-being (i.e. the “social” and the “fair sin” experiences).

Companies that provide food experiences can prime meanings that influence consumers’ perceptions of the episode to elicit positive emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being.

Promoting a more holistic view of food consumption and psychological well-being can free consumers from negative emotions during food consumption episodes. Priming a particular meaning can be a way to do that. However, as visceral experience can still lead to health issues, this must be combined with an education process that makes consumers aware of their food habits.

This research challenges the idea that visceral food experiences are always negative. Indeed, when associated with particular meanings (i.e. social and reward), they have a positive valence post-consumption.

Consumer food behavior has received considerable attention from marketers, researchers and regulators. With the rising obesity epidemic worldwide, the existing literature and previous reviews provide a limited understanding of consumers’ unhealthy food choices. To address this gap, this study aims to investigate consumer psychology for food choices in terms of mental processes and behavior.

This systematic literature review analyzed 84 research papers accessed from the Web of Science database and selected high-quality marketing journals. A detailed analysis identified themes arranged in an organizing framework. Gaps, limitations, convergence and ambivalent findings were noted to derive future research directions.

Major themes in the literature include food marketers’ actions (food stimuli and context), environmental influence (micro and macro) and consumer psychology and personal factors, leading to food choice related decisions. The antecedents and consequences of food choice healthiness are summarized. Several studies converged on the benefits of health motivations and goals, food literacy and customizing meals bottom-up on food choice healthiness.

This review helps researchers gain state-of-the-art understanding on consumer psychology for food choices. It presents ambivalent and converging findings, gaps and limitations of extant research to inform researchers about issues that need to be addressed in the literature. This review presents future research questions to guide research on critical issues. This literature review contributes to marketing domain literature on consumer’s food well-being and overall well-being.

This review offers actionable insights for food marketers, policymakers and nongovernmental organizations to drive consumer demand for healthier foods, focusing on food labeling, food environment, message framing and raising consumer awareness.

This review offers current understanding of consumer psychology for food choices focusing on healthiness, an aspect lacking in previous literature reviews.

This study aims to empirically investigate how the interaction effect of occasion-setting cues and consumers’ cognitive styles (e.g. field dependence levels) influences their food intake intention.

In this research, several scenario simulation studies were conducted to verify the hypotheses. A total of 646 participants were recruited for the experiments, and samples were obtained through well-established online research platforms.

In the occasion-setting cue advertisement condition, field-dependent (vs field-independent) consumers displayed increased cravings for food and purchase intention, with mental simulation playing a mediating role and cognitive load playing a moderating role.

The influence of others (e.g. servers and other consumers) was not taken into consideration in this study. Future research can extend this study by conducting field experiments.

The research conclusions can help various organisations reduce consumers’ food overconsumption intention and encourage healthier food choices by adjusting occasion-setting cues in marketing stimuli and identifying the target consumers’ cognitive styles.

Based on embodied cognition theory, this study reveals the influence and internal mechanism of the interaction effect between occasion-setting cues and individual cognitive style on eating desire.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to sexual images activates the urge to yield to temptation in a subsequent unrelated context.

In Study 1, this paper uses empirical data based on an automobile expo to examine the correlational relationship between sexual imagery and indulgence. In Studies 2 and 3, this study examines the moderating effects of self-construal and gender differences on indulgent consumption, with different dependent measures. Study 4 distinguishes the sexual images into gratuitous sex and romantic love and tests the mediating role of sensation seeking.

For men, an independent self-construal increases indulgent consumption. In contrast, an interdependent self-construal facilitates women’s indulgent consumption. Having an interdependent self-construal has the opposite impact on indulgent consumption for the two genders: sexual images of romantic love attenuate the effect on men but boost the effect on women. Perceived sensation-seeking serves as the underlying mechanism.

This paper contributes to the literature on sex, reward-processing, context effects in marketing and indulgent consumption.

Advertisers, retailers, food courts and restaurants may use sexual imagery to promote more indulgent consumption with gender and self-construal as segmentation variables. Public policymakers and other concerned parties should also raise consumers’ awareness of the priming effect found in this research.

This research advances the literature on sex by demonstrating the priming effects of sexual imagery and further considers the simultaneous impacts of gender and self-construal on consumers’ subsequent indulgent consumption.

This paper aims to examine how emotions affect consumers' food choices and food preparation activities during stressful periods, using the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China.

This study used an online survey, with a sample of 1,050 individuals from 32 regions in China. Multi-regression and mediation models were used to test the relationships among perceived knowledge, emotions and food behaviors.

The results show that positive emotions positively affect healthy food consumption and engagement in food preparations. In contrast, negative emotions contribute to an increase in indulgent food consumption and quick-and-easy meal preparations. Increased knowledge of the current situation can enhance positive emotions and thus promote healthy food behaviors. Lacking knowledge may result in unhealthy food behaviors through negative emotions.

This study contributes to the understanding of emotions and food behaviors by examining the effects of both negative and positive emotions in the general population, exploring a wider constellation of food behaviors and identifying perceived knowledge as an important antecedent to emotions' effects on food behaviors. Implications for consumers and public policy are offered.