Food Emotional Perception and Eating Willingness Under Different Lighting Colors: A Preliminary Study Based on Consumer Facial Expression Analysis

The influence of lighting color on food is a multidimensional process, linking visual interventions with people’s perception of food appearance, physiological responses, and psychological associations. This study, as a preliminary exploratory research, aims to initially investigate the effects of different lighting colors on food-induced consumer appetite and emotional perception. By measuring consumers’ physiological facial expression data, we verify whether the results are consistent with self-reported subjective evaluations. Questionnaires, Shapiro–Wilk tests, and one-sample t-tests were employed for data mining and cross-validation and combined with generalized facial expression recognition (GFER) technology to analyze participants’ emotional perceptions under various lighting colors. The results show that consumers displayed the most positive emotions and the highest appetite under 2700 K warm white light. Under this condition, the average intensity of participants’ “happy” emotion was 0.25 (SD = 0.12), indicating a clear positive emotional state. Eating willingness also reached its peak at 2700 K. In contrast, blue light-induced negative emotions and lower appetite. Among all lighting types, blue light evoked the strongest “sad” emotion (M = 0.39). This study provides a preliminary exploration of the theoretical framework regarding the relationship between food and consumer behavior, offering new perspectives for product marketing in the food industry and consumer food preference cognition. However, the generalizability of its conclusions still requires further verification in subsequent studies.