The neglected dimension: Arousal as a key to understanding product choices

Conferenza con John Prescott - Chair: Nicola Perullo | Discussant: Maria Piochi

Aula Miroglio - martedì 10 novembre 2026 - ore 17.00

Recognizing that liking ratings are poor predictors of product choices has led to a focus on measuring emotions in consumer studies of foods and other goods.
Such measures can be resolved into two underlying factors, valence and arousal, which account for most of the variance in emotion ratings.
The good bad dimension ( is approximated by routine liking ratings, which are assumed to reflect sensory pleasure.
In contrast, arousal is seldom measured in response to products, despite evidence of its importance in advertising, product selection, and personality traits that influence product choice.
Emotion measures may provide additional explanatory power over liking measures because they implicitly capture variations in product related arousal.
This presentation will overview the rationale for routinely measuring arousal, with examples of interpreting arousal measures and their relationship with valence.

John Prescott

He received his PhD in Neuropsychology from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1986.
He has served as Co Director of CSIRO’s Sensory Research Centre, Director of the University of Otago’s Sensory Science Research Centre, and Professor of Psychology at James Cook University and the University of Newcastle, Australia.
He is currently Visiting Professor at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, where he has taught the Understanding Consumers international course for ten years.
From 2005 to 2024 he was joint Editor in Chief of Food Quality and Preference and served on the editorial boards of Chemosensory Perception and the Journal of Sensory Studies.
He has authored over 150 refereed publications on sensory perception, food preferences, learning, cross cultural differences, personality, genetics, multimodal interactions, and
food related emotions.
He also authored Taste Matters Why We Like the Foods We Do (2012) translated into Italian as Questione Di Gusto (2013).