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AAnyone who supports a talkative movie audience or a stuck stone in his shoe knows how hard it is to have fun when you feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is a form of physical stress that can have profound effects on the senses. Now, researchers who publish in the Journal of Consumer Research show that discomfort can even reduce the amount of food a person enjoys, by suggesting a simple posture solution that could enhance the experience.
In an article published on May 11, researchers led by Dipayan Biswas, a professor of marketing at the University of South Florida, showed that eating permanent reduces people's pleasure in eating, causing them to eat less than sitting eaters.
Physical stress "associated with maintaining upright postures, even for a short time, can reduce sensory sensitivity," they write. "In addition, we show that this diminished sensory sensitivity has consequences on the taste assessment of foods and beverages, the perception of food temperature and the overall volume of consumption."
In the first of six experiments to determine the influence of sitting or standing on our eating pleasure, 358 participants were brought to a laboratory with a chair or without a chair, assuming they were performing a simple taste test. Fifteen of them had to be excluded because they had guessed what the true purpose of the study was.
Of the remaining participants, the caretakers rated the pita pita snack as definitely tastier than the standers.
In seeking to understand why this was the case, the team hypothesized that negative associations with eating on the run or rushing could reduce pleasure and that focus on the physical discomfort of To be standing distracted from the tasting experience.
To dissociate this interaction, volunteers from the following three experiments sampled foods under different conditions, which always included a comparison between sitting and standing. In all of these experiments, participants assessed their physical and psychological stress and their pleasure in eating.
Evidence suggests that the feeling of relaxation plays a role in pleasure. Notably, when standing volunteers were eating a cookie after drinking a placebo drink called "inducing a physical relaxation," they felt that the cookie was nicer than other players, although less pleasant than the guards.
Another experiment tested whether these effects would be valid for unpleasanttasting food. In fact, people who have tasted a salty brownie while standing up classify it as more pleasant than the people who tasted it while sitting.
This suggests that the effect is not about how sitting or standing affects pleasure, but rather how it affects the person's attention to their own sensory experiences. The researchers concluded that the people who were standing were more appreciative of the bad brownie because they did not pay much attention to it, but rather focused on their standing posture.
At the last experiment, volunteers sampled hot coffee to test the impact of sitting and standing on another dimension of sensory perception, namely temperature. In this experiment, the audience drank less coffee and noticed that the temperature was lower than the participants.
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The authors advise marketers to become aware of a "sixth sense" beyond the traditional meaning of the five: the vestibular meaning, the system associated with balance and spatial orientation.
The authors emphasize that this is of particular interest to restaurant managers, especially as catering trucks and independent restaurants have become more popular. "The results of our studies suggest that restaurant managers might find it's an optimal strategy to encourage guests to sit down while eating," they write.
For the average person, these results also suggest that a very simple change in body position can have a profound impact on the eating experience. Alternatively, for those seeking to limit their food intake, standing up can be a useful distraction.
Abstract: Previous research has examined the role of the five traditional sensory systems (visual, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and taste) and their influence on food assessments. This research extends the boundaries of sensory marketing by examining the effects of the vestibular system, often referred to as the "sixth sensory system", responsible for balance and posture. The results of six experiments show that vestibular sensations related to posture (ie sitting or standing) influence the perception of food taste. Specifically, standing (versus sitting) postures induce increased physical stress on the body, which decreases sensory sensitivity. As a result, when they eat standing (or sit), consumers judge the taste of drinks and food tastes less favorable, the temperature less intense and consume smaller amounts. The effects of posture on the perception of taste are reversed for foods with an unpleasant taste.
These results have conceptual implications for broadening the boundaries of sensory marketing and for the effects of sensory systems on the perception of food taste. Given the growing tendency to eat upright, the results also have practical implications for restaurant, retail and other environmental designs.
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