ESN-Industry Partnership Project #5


Can dislike be measured more precisely?

Since 2009 the European Sensory Network together with its industry partners has annually launched one to two new collaborative research projects. The 5th collaborative research project, which started in April 2011, once again addresses a methodological question. The researchers aim at evaluating alternative scaling methods for measuring affective responses to food and drink products.

Within this project the scientists are comparing different scales with which respondents can express both their overall likes and dislikes for a product on separate scales. As a reference they are using a conventional bipolar 9-point hedonic scale. They expect that the separation of the affective responses in both a liking and disliking dimension will provide more detailed information about both negative aspects and positive aspects of products, than obtained by the original 9-point hedonic scale alone. If the new test liking/disliking scaling method proves to be applicable for hedonic food evaluations, new approaches for internal and external PREFMAPping analysis will be developed.


Involved ESN partners

  • KU-LIFE from Denmark (coordinator)  
  • Campden BRI, UK
  • INRAN,Italy
  • Nofima Mat, Norway
  • SAM, Germany
  • SIK, Sweden
  • Heineken as industry partner

A challenging task: finding the right scale