ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutritional Ecology and Anthropology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1584409
Food Neophobia: Psychological Dimensions of Consumer Perception and Emotional Sentiment in Social Media Discourse
Provisionally accepted
- Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
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Addressing global food security necessitates exploring future foods, yet their societal acceptance hinges critically on public perception and psychological barriers such as neophobia. This study delves into the psychological dimensions underlying consumer perception of future foods, investigating the intricate relationship between food neophobia and these perceptions, and mapping the prevailing emotional landscape surrounding novel food adoption. Employing a Social Media Analytics (SMA) framework to capture ecologically valid public discourse, we utilized social media text analysis, integrating topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to dissect online expressions concerning future foods. Our analysis reveals that public evaluations are predominantly positive (53.20%), while a substantial segment expresses negative sentiments (30.48%) and ambivalence (16.32%). Psychologically, we identified four salient perceptual dimensions -taste, appearance, culture, and technology -which differentially mediate food neophobia and elicit distinct emotional valences. Notably, appearance and cultural perceptions are associated with heightened neophobia and negative emotional responses, suggesting underlying psychological mechanisms of sensory and socio-cultural rejection. These findings offer critical psychological insights for future food producers and policymakers, highlighting the psychological determinants of public attitudes towards future foods and informing psychologically-informed strategies to enhance consumer acceptance and promote dietary innovation.
Keywords: future foods, Perception of future foods, neophobia, social media analytics (SMA), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
Received: 28 Feb 2025; Accepted: 03 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shan, Wang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hong Wang, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, 610059, Sichuan Province, China
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