Specifics of the Emotional Response of Patients Suffering From Major Depressive Disorder to Imagined Basic Tastes of Food.

Nowadays, the major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common disease that negatively affects the life quality of many people around the world. As MDD symptoms are closely related with the changes in food and eating, the relation between patients' emotional responses and food tastes could be used as criteria for diagnostic. Until now, studies on the emotional response to different food tastes for patients affected by MDD have been poorly described in literature. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the emotional response of patients suffering from MDD to the imagined different food tastes and to compare the results with a control group. Emotional responses in tested participants were induced by using cards with words of basic food tastes such as "sweet," "salty," "bitter," "sour," and "neutral." The assessment of emotional response was performed with FaceReader 6 software. The outcome of this study showed that participants with MDD expressed lower "happy" and "contempt" and higher "surprised" emotions, along with a higher negative valence mean, in comparison with controls for all tested basic tastes of food (p ≤ 0.05). When Likert scale was used, significant differences (p ≤ 0.001) in response were only found for "sour" and "salty" imaginary tastes between healthy group and patients with MDD. The findings of this study provide the additional data on food-associated emotion analysis of MDD patients and could be useful for the further development of the contactless method for early diagnosis of MDD.

Factors Affecting Consumer Food Preferences: Food Taste and Depression-Based Evoked Emotional Expressions with the Use of Face Reading Technology.

In this study, several factors (social status, age, gender, education, knowledge about healthy eating, and attitude to food) affecting consumer food choices (FC), including the relationship between the taste of food, FC, and depression, were analysed by using sensory traits and face reading technology. The first stage of the experimental scheme was the analysis of factors affecting consumer food preferences by using a questionnaire, while the second stage was evaluation of emotional expressions evoked by different food tastes in individuals with and without depressive disorders (DD), using the FaceReader 6 software. We show that gender is a significant factor for most emotional motivations, with a higher effect in females where there was an indication of increased cravings for sweets when feeling depressed. Age was a significant factor in the motivation to eat for positive feelings, while education had a significant influence on perceptions regarding healthy eating. Face reading technology was found to be sufficiently accurate to detect differences in facial expressions induced by different tastes of food, for groups with and without DD. In conclusion, many factors are of high importance in the analysis of food choices, and the results obtained using the FaceReader 6 technique are very promising for food-mood relation analysis. We suggest that mood has a strong link with the choice of food.