How emotions and social interaction affect our food experience

The initial intent of this research was to understand whether there were possible interferences between the perception – the sensorial response of the individual when approaching food – and the effective, objective quality of the food Our aim was to investigate whether, at the moment a person is about to experience food, some external factor might influence the individual’s subsequent choice of food. We also wondered whether external factors might render a dish more or less appetizing. Initially we thought about investigating "external factors" such as changes of (exclusively) visual sensory aspects that would directly influence the appeal of food, such as color or size. Later, and during the course of our research, we decided to change our approach and investigate whether there might also be factors unrelated to the food that influence the perception of taste and the subsequent desirability of the food. For a given food, just before its consumption, we asked ourselves which environmental, external human factors might affect the internal subjective representation sufficiently to change the entire food experience. Our approach did not take into consideration a human environment where there was consumption of food, which has already been extensively investigated in numerous studies, but only the interference of the mere sight of an emotion relayed by others’ facial expressions. This research hypothesis is based on the concept of heterosis. We are interested in the method by which to approach a path of heterosis of scientific thought. Starting from the genetic concept of "hybrid vigor", we asked ourselves about the power of a multidisciplinary approach among different scientific disciplines, especially between food science and technology (presence of food), neuroscience (recent discoveries in the field of mirror neurons) and behavioral psychology (changes in food choice). In the field of genetics, heterosis refers to crossbreeding between unrelated individuals. The term heterosis is synonymous with interspecific hybridization, and is the opposite of inbreeding: in the scientific field, according to our approach and idea for the thesis, inbreeding signifies continuing to investigate within the same field of study, without any aperture towards other disciplines, or at least without assessing whether there might be possible interactions of an interdisciplinary nature. The population (gene pool) deriving from heterosis is a genotype which increases the frequency of heterozygosity, which means an increase in the number of loci with different alleles for the gene for the same character. This involves the generation of advantages that improve the fertility and genetics of the species. On the contrary, inbreeding increases the homozygosity, i.e. the presence of identical alleles at the same locus, and this is to the detriment of future genetic improvement. Heterosis is associated with the observed phenomenon known as hybrid vigor, in which the individual is the product of the coupling characteristics of a particularly vigorous phenotype: for example, there is an increase in stature, enhanced fertility, and a stronger resistance to disease. On the other hand, in the case of inbreeding one finds inbreeding depression, in which, among other things, there is an increase in the frequency of genetic diseases and a reduction of vigor and stature. The parallelism that we assumed in the scientific disciplines sees, in the field of interdisciplinary studies, a multiplier effect of discoveries and insights to the benefit of specific individual fields of research. The hybridization of different fields of science can generate new and unexplored fields of research, which may (this is our hypothesis) lead to new disciplines that are the result of the hybridization of such fields. For example: intelligent eating might be a wide new field of research involving neuroscience, psychology, medicine and food science and technology. The underlying theme of this thesis project, supported by comprehensive bibliographic database, is clearly of a hybrid nature, also in the formulation and planning of behavioral experiments. We followed the exploration of such hybridization of science fields without ever going into the specifics of one or the other discipline, but trying to maintain its cross-cutting nature. It is our hope that new fields of research, and even new branches of studies, might result from the heterosis of scientific disciplines, and this effort is intended to be a modest, experimental start whose ambition is to inspire a future in which every field of science has an internal development, specific and specialized, and one or more parallel multidisciplinary developments, each with a precise logic for the development and evolution of the holistic understanding of man.