Meet OLAF, a good friend of the IAPS! The Open Library of Affective Foods: a tool to investigate the emotional impact of food in adolescents

Abstract

In the last decades, food pictures have been repeatedly employed to investigate the emotional impact of food on healthy participants as well as individuals who suffer from eating disorders and obesity. However, despite their widespread use, food pictures are typically selected according to each researcher’s personal criteria, which make it difficult to reliably select food images and to compare results across different studies and laboratories. Therefore, to study affective reactions to food, it becomes pivotal to identify the emotional impact of specific food images based on wider samples of individuals. In the present paper we introduce the Open Library of Affective Foods (OLAF), which is a set of original food pictures created to reliably select food pictures based on the emotions they prompt, as indicated by affective ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance and by an additional food craving scale. OLAF images were designed to allow simultaneous use with affective images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), which is a well-known instrument to investigate emotional reactions in the laboratory. The ultimate goal of the OLAF is to contribute to understanding how food is emotionally processed in healthy individuals and in patients who suffer from eating and weight-related disorders. The present normative data, which was based on a large sample of an adolescent population, indicate that when viewing affective non-food IAPS images, valence, arousal, and dominance ratings were in line with expected patterns based on previous emotion research. Moreover, when viewing food pictures, affective and food craving ratings were consistent with research on food cue processing. As a whole, the data supported the methodological and theoretical reliability of the OLAF ratings, therefore providing researchers with a standardized tool to reliably investigate the emotional and motivational significance of food. The OLAF database is publicly available at zenodo.org