Facial electromyography and subjective liking data from 70 New Zealand participants in response to food images and chocolate samples.

This article describes a dataset of facial electromyography and subjective liking data from 70 New Zealand participants used in the study "An unfamiliar presence reduces facial disgust responses to food stimuli" by Nath, Cannon and Philipp [1]. Participants' facial muscle activity from zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and levator labii superioris was recorded as they viewed and rated food images, and tasted samples of chocolate. Half of the participants were seated alone, and the other half was seated in the presence of the researcher. The data allows for investigations into the effect of social context on hedonic ratings and facial responses to food, and an exploration into the individual factors contributing to differences in facial reactivity. The data includes raw EMG files generated by Acqknowledge 4.2, raw subjective liking files generated by PsychoPy, a table of participant information, the food images stimuli, the PsychoPy code used for stimuli presentation, and the R scripts used to filter, aggregate and analyse the data.

An unfamiliar social presence reduces facial disgust responses to food stimuli.

Consumers' emotional responses complement sensory and hedonic ratings in the prediction of food choice and consumption behaviour. The challenge with the measurement of consumption emotions is that emotions are highly context dependent. For emotion evaluations to bring greater insight to food research and development, it is essential that the influence of contextual variables on emotion are quantified. The present study contributes to the discussion with an investigation of the effect of an unfamiliar social presence on affective facial responses to visual food stimuli. Seventy participants (52 female and 18 male) viewed food images of varying acceptability either alone, or in the presence of the researcher. Subjective liking ratings were measured using a labelled affective magnitude scale, and facial muscle activity from zygomaticus major (contracted during smiling), corrugator supercilii (contracted during frowning) and levator labii superioris (contracted during nose wrinkling) were measured with an EMG recording system. Controlling for individual differences in facial expressivity and food image acceptability using linear mixed models, it was found that social context did not predict smiling or frowning muscle activity. Social context did predict the intensity of muscle activity indicative of a disgust response, with participants in the observed condition exhibiting less levator activity than participants in the alone condition. Regardless of social context, each muscle was found to have a relationship with subjective liking, with the direction of effects as expected. The results indicate that emotional stimuli and social context both influence food-evoked facial expression and provides support for the utility of facial EMG in measuring food-evoked emotion.