Academic Consortium Publications for October 2022

If you enjoy a paper with a good methods section, check out the two-group study described in the one by Hannum and Simons (2022) that was published last month in Food Research International. In a nutshell: both groups are assigned 20 tetrad questions. One lucky group gets the positive condition: interesting sensory stimuli, where getting the correct grouping is neither overly easy nor overly difficult. But the unlucky group gets the negative condition; here, the task was hopeless because in every question the samples were identical sucrose solutions. In the authors' own words, the latter task was designed "to promote a state of helplessness and encourage disengagement". The reason for plunging these assessors into such a state was not mere cruelty but to validate the Engagement Questionnaire (EQ). Indeed, the EQ showed that consumers were more engaged in the positive group: they were more actively involved, had higher purposeful intent, and higher affective value. Also, their facial expressions were coded to have a broader spectrum of emotions and fewer neutral expressions. So this finding validates the EQ. But it also demonstrates a way of frustrating your sensory assessors, should scientific advancement ever depend on doing so again. You can read about this and other studies published this month by members of the Compusense Academic Consortium below.