Neophobia

In family meals the normative and the performative are very far apart—though everyone likes to think of the family table as a place of harmony and solidarity, it is often the scene for the exercise of power and authority, a place where conflict prevails. My interest in this topic was sparked by research on middle-class parents’ struggles with their “picky eater” children.
Besides narrating the way the dinner table became battleground with their own children, many parents also recalled their
own childhood family meals as painful and difficult. From this very narrow focus on family struggles, I expand the discussion
to the larger question of why this topic is relatively ignored in social science, and I question the sources of the normative
power of the family “happy meal.” The ideological emphasis on family dinners has displaced social responsibility from public
institutions to private lives, and the construction of normative family performances is part of a process that constructs
different family types as deviant and delinquent.

This study adopts PERMA as the theoretical lens to analyze the influence of neophobia (reluctance to try new food) and enduring involvement on travelers' perceptions of the contribution of authentic food experiences to their well-being. Based on a survey of international visitors to Iran, the results show that authentic food experiences are strongly associated with positive emotions and meaningfulness of a trip. Higher food involvement and lower neophobia are associated with stronger perceptions that authentic food experiences contribute to well-being. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the applicability of the PERMA model for understanding multiple dimensions of well-being emanating from tourism experiences.

This study provides a framework of the factors predicting the intention of eating an insect-based product. As part of the study, a seminar was carried out to explore how the provision of information about ecological, health, and gastronomic aspects of entomophagy would modify consumer beliefs regarding insects as food. Before and after the informative seminar, two questionnaires about sociodemographic attributes and beliefs about the consumption of insects as food were given. Participants were then asked to carry out a sensory evaluation of two identical bread samples, but one was claimed to be supplemented with insect powder. Results showed that perceived behavioral control is the main predictor of the intention, followed by neophobia and personal insect food rejection. The disgust factor significantly decreased after the participants attended the informative seminar. Sensory scores highlighted that participants gave "insect-labelled" samples higher scores for flavor, texture, and overall liking, nevertheless, participants indicated that they were less likely to use the "insect-labelled" bread in the future. Our findings provide a better understanding of insect food rejection behavior and help to predict the willingness to try insect-based products based on some important individual traits and information.

Il nuovo regolamento sui Novel Food potrebbe creare i presupposti per lo sviluppo di un mercato di nicchia per i prodotti a base di insetti. In questo studio viene investigato l’interesse e il comportamento dei consumatori riguardo l’entomofagia. I risultati mostrano che la food neophobia è negativamente correlata alla disponibilità al consumo e che dopo la prima esperienza di assaggio le aspettative sensoriali positive migliorano e la neophobia si riduce.

This is an unsuccessful grant proposal to the US Department of Agriculture, which had a program for small experimental grants in 2009 and 2010. We wrote this because there was almost no ethnographic social science being done on how American families ate meals together; the literature came entirely from food science, home economics and nutrition science.  These research traditions had medicalized picky eating into something called "neophobia," a category we questioned. Instead we wanted to approach picky eating as an issue of gender and power in the household.  When I was doing the pilot interviews for the proposal, I was inundated with calls from women who wanted to talk about their children's picky eating. Anthropologists we met were telling us that children were becoming picky about their food in Brazil, Turkey and Mexico, which suggested that family meals were changing in many parts of the world in important ways. But this proposal was not funded, nor was the version that went to NSF, which had a "exploratory research" small grant program at the time. I still think this is an important topic which deserves further research.

The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human risks eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. Categorization-based stranger avoidance theory identifies the cause of this feeling as categorizing the entity into a novel category. This explanation is doubtful because stranger is not a novel category in adults; infants do not avoid strangers while the category stranger remains novel; infants old enough to fear strangers prefer photographs of strangers to those more closely resembling a familiar person ; and the uncanny valley's characteristic eeriness is seldom felt when meeting strangers. We repeated our original experiment with a more realistic 3D computer model and found no support for categorization-based stranger avoidance theory. By contrast, realism inconsistency theory explains cold, eerie feelings elicited by transitions between instances of two different, mutually exclusive categories, given that at least one category is anthropomorphic: Cold, eerie feelings are caused by prediction error from perceiving some features as features of the first category and other features as features of the second category. In principle, realism inconsistency theory can explain not only negative evaluations of transitions between real and computer modeled humans but also between different vertebrate species.

This study provides a framework of the factors predicting the intention of eating an insect-based product. As part of the study, a seminar was carried out to explore how the provision of information about ecological, health, and gastronomic aspects of entomophagy would modify consumer beliefs regarding insects as food. Before and after the informative seminar, two questionnaires about sociodemographic attributes and beliefs about the consumption of insects as food were given. Participants were then asked to carry out a sensory evaluation of two identical bread samples, but one was claimed to be supplemented with insect powder. Results showed that perceived behavioral control is the main predictor of the intention, followed by neophobia and personal insect food rejection. The disgust factor significantly decreased after the participants attended the informative seminar. Sensory scores highlighted that participants gave “insect-labelled” samples higher scores for flavor, texture, and ...

This study provides a framework of the factors predicting the intention of eating an insect-based product. As part of the study, a seminar was carried out to explore how the provision of information about ecological, health, and gastronomic aspects of entomophagy would modify consumer beliefs regarding insects as food. Before and after the informative seminar, two questionnaires about sociodemographic attributes and beliefs about the consumption of insects as food were given. Participants were then asked to carry out a sensory evaluation of two identical bread samples, but one was claimed to be supplemented with insect powder. Results showed that perceived behavioral control is the main predictor of the intention, followed by neophobia and personal insect food rejection. The disgust factor significantly decreased after the participants attended the informative seminar. Sensory scores highlighted that participants gave “insect-labelled” samples higher scores for flavor, texture, and ...

Theory suggests that the balance between unknown dangers and novel opportunities drives the evolution of species-level neophobia. Juveniles show lower neophobia than adults, within mammals and birds, presumably to help minimize the costs of avoiding beneficial novelty, and adults tend to be more neophobic, to reduce risks and focus on known stimuli. How these dynamics function in island species with fewer dangers from predators and toxic prey is not well understood. Yet, predicting neophobia levels at different age classes may be highly valuable in conservation contexts, such as species' trans-location programmes, where responses to novelty can influence the effectiveness of prerelease training and animals' survival postrelease. To better understand how neophobia and its age-related patterns are expressed in an island corvid, we surveyed object neophobia in 84% of the world's critically endangered 'alal a, Corvus hawaiiensis. Individuals repeatedly demonstrated high neophobia, suggesting that neither captivity nor their island evolution has erased this corvid-typical trait. Unexpectedly, juveniles were exceedingly more neophobic than adults, a pattern in stark contrast to common neophobia predictions and known mammalian and avian studies. We discuss the potential conservation ramifications of this age-structured result within the larger context of neophobia theory. Not only may the expression of neophobia be more complicated than previously thought but predicting such responses may also be important for conservation management that requires exposing animals to novelty.

This study provides a framework of the factors predicting the intention of eating an insect-based product. As part of the study, a seminar was carried out to explore how the provision of information about ecological, health, and gastronomic aspects of entomophagy would modify consumer beliefs regarding insects as food. Before and after the informative seminar, two questionnaires about sociodemographic attributes and beliefs about the consumption of insects as food were given. Participants were then asked to carry out a sensory evaluation of two identical bread samples, but one was claimed to be supplemented with insect powder. Results showed that perceived behavioral control is the main predictor of the intention, followed by neophobia and personal insect food rejection. The disgust factor significantly decreased after the participants attended the informative seminar. Sensory scores highlighted that participants gave “insect-labelled” samples higher scores for flavor, texture, and ...

A plethora of research now demonstrates that processes of visual attention towards certain stimuli (particularly threat) influences vulnerability to, and the maintenance of, anxiety disorders. Here parallels can be drawn with food neophobia and the eating disorder literature. As such, the application of knowledge from anxiety research may prove useful in increasing our understanding of food neophobia (and disordered eating more generally). In this chapter, we first present a review of the main components of attentional bias, before demonstrating that similar processes of visual attention (i.e. facilitated engagement, delayed disengagement and/or avoidance) are apparent within both adult and child (disordered) eating. These biases, as with anxiety disorders, could potentially exacerbate the specific eating condition. We also briefly review evidence concerning the effectiveness of attentional training in treating anxiety disorders, and suggest that such therapies may be applicable in ...

Human activities are increasingly confronting animals with unfamiliar environmental conditions. For example, habitat change and loss often lead to habitat fragmentation, which can create barriers of unsuitable and unfamiliar habitat affecting animal movements and survival. When confronted with habitat changes, animals' cognitive abilities play an important, but often neglected part in dealing with such change. Animals must decide whether to approach and investigate novel habitats (spatial neophilia) or whether to avoid them (spatial neophobia) due to potential danger. For species with strict habitat preferences, such as the Gouldian finch (Erythrura gouldiae), which is an open habitat specialist, understanding these novelty responses may be especially important for predicting responses to habitat changes. The Gouldian finch is a polymorphic species, with primarily red or black head colors, which are linked to differing behavioral phenotypes, including novelty reactions. Here we investigate responses to novel habitats (open, dense) in the Gouldian finch, manipulating the color composition of same-sex pairs. Two experiments, each consisting of novel open and novel dense habitat, tested birds in opposite head color combinations in the two experiments. We measured the number of approaches birds made (demonstrating conflict between approach and avoidance), and their entry latency to novel habitats. Gouldian finches showed more approach attempts (stronger approach-avoidance conflict) toward the dense as compared to the open habitat, confirming their open habitat preferences. Black-headed birds also hesitated longer to enter the dense habitat as compared to the open habitat, particularly in experiment 1, appearing less neophilic than red-headed birds, which showed similar entry latencies into both habitat types. This is surprising as black-headed birds were more neophilic in other contexts. Moreover, there was some indication that pairings including at least one black-headed bird had a stronger approach-avoidance conflict than pairings of pure red-headed birds. Results suggest that the black-headed Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | www.frontiersin.org 1 September 2020 | Volume 8 | Article 498347