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Pictured left: Professor Brandon McFadden, Professor Andy Brownback, Professor Khoa Lu, and graduate student Anh Pha Nguyen (not pictured: Sherry Lee)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a $650,000 grant to an interdisciplinary research team led by the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business in collaboration with the Colleges of Agriculture and Engineering.
The three-year grant will fund innovative research that combines behavioral economics, nutritional science and artificial intelligence to gain deeper insights into consumer decisions about food.
The fusion of economics, science, and AI
The project involves a diverse team of researchers from the University of Alberta, ensuring a multifaceted approach to addressing a real-world challenge. The interdisciplinary research team is led by Andy Brownback and Shelley Lee from the Walton College Department of Economics. Contributing to the experiment design is Brandon McFadden, a researcher at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and professor in the Dale Bumpers College of Agriculture, Food and Life Sciences. The station is a research division of the University of Alberta System’s Faculty of Agriculture. The artificial intelligence element of the research is led by Core Lu from the Faculty of Computer Science and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering.
“This grant will enable us to explore the emotional context of food choices in ways never before possible,” Brownback said. “By using AI and machine vision techniques to analyze micro-expressions, we hope to quantify how emotional states causally influence people’s food choices.”
The findings from this study have the potential to reshape nutrition policy and improve public health outcomes by providing a more nuanced understanding of how emotions and psychology influence dietary decisions.
A groundbreaking methodology
The study utilises machine vision AI technology developed by Luu to analyse subtle facial expressions and quantify emotional states, then correlate this data with food choices to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the decision-making process.
“We’re not just looking at what comfort foods are,” Brownback explains, “we’re looking to better understand the emotional state we’re in when making food choices and how that causally influences people’s decisions.”
Researchers will collaborate between the Walton College’s Behavioral Business Research Lab and the College of Engineering’s Computer Vision and Image Understanding Lab.
Implications for public health policy
The researchers aim to develop new methodologies for measuring emotions during the decision-making process, which could have wider implications not only for nutrition policy but also for understanding consumer behavior across different sectors.
“If we can better understand the psychological factors that drive food choices, we can begin to develop more effective policies and interventions to promote healthier eating habits,” Brownback said. “This isn’t just about individual health, it’s about smart policy: If we’re paying for nutritional subsidies and then paying for the health consequences of malnutrition, we’re stealing from ourselves as a society.”
Food Security and Nutrition
The grant is part of USDA’s broader efforts to improve nutrition and food security for the American people, and the findings from this study may inform future USDA programs and policies aimed at encouraging healthier food choices and addressing food insecurity issues.
“Our goal is to understand why people make choices that are inconsistent with their goals,” Brownback added. “This ‘dynamic contradiction’ is a central problem in behavioral economics, and understanding it better could revolutionize how we approach nutrition policy.”
Potential for wider impacts
Though the primary focus is nutrition, the researchers believe their methodology could have far-reaching implications: “If successful, this approach to quantifying emotions in decision-making could have applications not only in nutrition but also in a variety of fields, including marketing, finance and management,” Brownback said.
The research team plans to begin work soon, with an initial focus on developing the infrastructure needed to extract data that can be used for economic analysis. As the project progresses, they hope to provide new insights that can revolutionize our current understanding of the role of emotions in food choices.
This research was supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Agriculture and Food Research (Project Grant Number 2024-67023-42545).
About Sam M. Walton College of Business: Founded in 1926, the Sam M. Walton College of Business is AACSB accredited and is ranked among the top business schools in the nation. Walton College is the University of Arkansas’ largest college, with approximately 9,000 students enrolled in undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs. Walton College was named a 2023 “Best Business School” by U.S. News & World Report, and the school’s undergraduate supply chain management program was ranked #1 in North America by Gartner. The school’s Master of Business Administration program was also ranked #11 in return on investment by The Wall Street Journal. The Princeton Review ranked the school’s graduate entrepreneurship program as one of the top in the nation for the first time in the 2022-23 academic year. Additionally, U of A’s online business degree programs in partnership with Global Campus were ranked #12 nationally among 214 institutions in 2023 by U.S. News.
About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas, the state’s flagship university, offers an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas contributes more than $3 billion to the Arkansas economy by imparting new knowledge and skills, developing entrepreneurship and jobs, inspiring discovery through research and creative activity, and providing specialized training. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among a handful of U.S. universities with the highest levels of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among the top public universities in the nation. Learn how the University of Arkansas is working to build a better world with Arkansas Research and Economic Development news.
