Plate size or plating? Effects of visual food presentation on liking, appetite, and food-evoked emotions in online and real-life contexts

The way food is presented can significantly influence liking, satiation, and emotional responses to food. This study explored these effects across two separate experiments by examining the impact of plate size (small vs. large) and plating style (high-stacked vs. spread) on participants' liking, satisfaction, fullness, and food-evoked emotions when consuming chicken salad. In the first experiment, conducted online (n = 192), we used interactive 360-degree videos to simulate real-life experiences of chicken salads under the different conditions. The second experiment expanded this research into a real-life cafeteria setting (n = 176) where participants actually consumed the chicken salads. In this setting, salads served on a large plate with high-stacked plating received the highest ratings for liking, compared to the other conditions: small plate-high-stacked, small plate-spread, and large plate-spread. This condition also evoked the most positive food-related emotions, such as happiness, satisfaction, and relaxation, and was perceived as closest to the "ideal portion size." Notably, the real-life experiment provided a better discrimination between the experimental conditions, with more intense and higher ratings on food-evoked emotions, liking, and willingness to pay compared to the online context. Real-life eating encompasses social interactions, sensory stimulation and post-ingestive effects, offering a richer and more accurate representation of actual eating experiences. These findings highlight the importance of real-life multi-modal measurement environments for obtaining accurate measures of food perception, acceptance and eating behaviours.