Walton College-Led Research Team Awarded Grant to Study Emotional Food Choices

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Pictured (l-r): Prof. Brandon McFadden, Prof. Andy Brownback, Prof. Khoa Luu, Graduate Student Anh Pha Nguyen (Not Pictured: Sherry Li)

The United States Department of Agriculture has awarded a $650,000 grant to an interdisciplinary research team led by the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, in collaboration with the Division of Agriculture and the College of Engineering. 

The three-year grant will fund innovative research combining behavioral economics, nutrition science and artificial intelligence to gain deeper insights into consumer decision-making around food. 

MERGING ECONOMICS, SCIENCE AND AI

A diverse team of U of A researchers are on the project, ensuring a multifaceted approach to tackling real-world challenges. At the lead of this interdisciplinary research team are Andy Brownback and Sherry Li from Walton College's Department of Economics. Collaborating on the experimental design is Brandon McFadden, a researcher for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and a professor in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. The experiment station is the research arm of the U of A System’s Division of Agriculture. Guiding the artificial intelligence elements of the study is Khoa Luu from the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering.

"This grant will allow us to examine the emotional antecedents of food choices in ways that have never been done before," said Brownback. "By leveraging AI and machine vision technology to analyze microexpressions, we hope to quantify how emotional states causally affect the food choices people make."

The findings from this study have the potential to reshape nutrition policies and improve public health outcomes by providing a more nuanced understanding of how emotions and psychology influence dietary decisions.

GROUNDBREAKING METHODOLOGY

This study will utilize machine vision AI technology developed by Luu to analyze facial microexpressions and quantify emotional states. This data will then be correlated with food choices to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the decision-making process.

"We're not just testing what comfort foods look like," Brownback explained. "We're aiming for a deeper understanding of the emotional state when making food choices and how that causally affects the decisions people make."

Researchers will be working between the Behavioral Business Research Lab at Walton College and the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Lab at the College of Engineering. 

IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY

The researchers aim to develop new methodologies for measuring emotions during the decision-making process. This could have broad implications not only for nutrition policy but also for understanding consumer behavior across various fields.

"If we can build a deeper understanding of the psychological factors driving food choices, we can start to develop more effective policies and interventions to promote healthier eating," Brownback stated. "This is not just about individual health, but also about smart policy. If we're paying for nutrition assistance and then paying for the health consequences of poor nutrition, we're essentially stealing from ourselves as a society."

FOOD SECURITY AND NUTRITION

The grant is part of the USDA's broader efforts to improve nutrition and food security among Americans. The research findings could help inform future USDA programs and policies aimed at encouraging healthier food choices and addressing issues of food insecurity.

Brownback added, "Our goal is to understand why people often make choices that don't align with their stated goals. This 'dynamic inconsistency' is a central issue in behavioral economics and understanding it better could revolutionize how we approach nutrition policy."

POTENTIAL FOR BROADER IMPACT

While the primary focus is on nutrition, the researchers believe their methodology could have far-reaching implications. "If successful, this approach to quantifying emotions in decision-making could be applied to various fields beyond nutrition, such as marketing, finance and management," Brownback noted.

The research team is set to begin their work immediately, with initial efforts focused on developing the infrastructure needed to extract usable data for economic analysis. As the project progresses, they hope to provide new insights that could reshape current understanding of the role emotions play in food choices.

This work is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, project award no. 2024-67023-42545, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

About the Sam M. Walton College of Business: Founded in 1926, the Sam M. Walton College of Business is AACSB-accredited and ranks among the top business schools in the nation. Walton College is the largest college at the University of Arkansas, serving nearly 9,000undergraduate, master's and doctoral students. Walton College is recognized among U.S. News & World Report's 2023 "Best Business Schools," and its undergraduate supply chain management program was ranked No. 1 in North America by Gartner. The college's Master of Business Administration program was also ranked No. 11 for best return on investment by The Wall Street Journal. The Princeton Review ranked the college's graduate entrepreneurship program as one of the top in the country for the first time in the 2022-23 year. And in partnership with the Global Campus, the U of A's online business degree program ranked No. 12 nationally among 214 institutions by U.S. News in 2023.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $3 billion to Arkansas’ economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.