Academic Consortium Publications for April 2024

‘Stressed’ spelled backwards is ‘desserts’. What word comes to mind on hearing ‘stressed’ and ‘desserts’? For many people, the answer is chocolate, of course. This month, we celebrate a publication by Jeong-Hyun Bae, Soo-Hyun Lee, and Jae-Hee Hong who investigated the relationship between chocolate choice motives of stressed consumers. Consumers were split into a control group and a stress group. Both the control and stress groups performed stress assessments before evaluating packaging and chocolates, but before the evaluations the stress group performed the Montreal imaging stress task (MIST), the cold pressor test (CPT), and listened to auditory stimuli designed to induce acute stress. Acute stress was associated with increase preference for and positive emotions associated with chocolate with more sensory appeal, but acute stress did not change the motives for consuming chocolate. Click here to indulge in this and other April publications from members of the Compusense Academic Consortium.