Increasing children's affective responses toward vegetables by character-product congruence

This study investigated whether unfamiliar characters are as effective as familiar characters in stimulating children’s affective responses toward healthy foods. Specifically, we investigated whether an unfamiliar character which is congruent with a product can be as effective as a familiar character. We tested two types of character-product congruence: conceptual congruence (based on a familiar link), and perceptual congruence (based on color similarity). In a repeated measures design, 166 children (4-6 years) were exposed to a picture of a carrot combined randomly with five different types of character: an (incongruent) familiar character and four unfamiliar characters varying in character-product congruence (i.e. both conceptually and perceptually congruent, conceptual only, perceptual only, and incongruent). We measured children’s automatic affective responses toward these character-product combinations using a time-constrained task, and elaborated affective responses using a non-constrained task. Our results revealed that the conceptually congruent unfamiliar characters were just as effective as the familiar character in increasing children’s automatic affective responses. However, the familiar character triggered the most positive elaborated affective responses. The results are explained in light of processing fluency and parasocial relationship theories.