Temporal dominance of sensory and emotional sensations for chocolate

Mapping food-evoked emotions in addition to sensory profiling is topical. For sensory profiling, Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) method focus on temporal evolution of sensory attributes over time. It seems plausible that food-evoked emotions show similar temporal dynamics that could be related to sensory dynamics. This study assessed temporal dynamics of sensory and emotional attributes during chocolate tasting. We used the TDS method for dynamic information on a list of 10 sensory attributes. Comparably, Temporal Dominance of Emotions (TDE) was assessed, by replacing the sensory list with emotional attributes. Sixty-two participants assessed TDS and TDE for five samples of different flavoured dark chocolate (i.e. Blueberry, Orange, Mint, and plain dark with 70% vs. 90% cacao). Multivariate comparisons (Hotelling- T 2 -test) using dominance durations showed significant differences between products based on sensory ( p 0.05 ) and emotional attributes ( p 0.05 ). TDS band plots revealed products to differ based on their dominant sensory attributes, with different attributes peaking at different time moments for various flavours. In line with our expectation, TDE band plots showed that products also differed in the temporal distribution of dominant emotional attributes. Comparison of TDS and TDE band plots suggested that, compared to the plain chocolates, the flavoured chocolates were characterized by more complex sensory profiles with stronger dynamics over time. Interestingly, this was associated with more positive/active emotional attributes gaining dominance over time, e.g. ‘interested’, ‘energetic’, and ‘happy’. These findings suggest TDE to be a promising new venue in characterising food-evoked emotions in relation to sensory profiling.