*4.2. Emotions and Multivariate Analysis of the Wine Sample in Di*ff*erent Environments*

In the present study, changes in the environment affected the elicited consumers' emotions toward the wine sample. Neutral to positive emotions such as "interested", "secure", "polite", and "friendly" were elicited for the wine tasted in the traditional booths and the real bright restaurant. The wine tasted in the real dark-restaurant and bright-VR environments was associated with "enthusiastic", "glad", and "aggressive". On the other hand, emotions such as "nostalgic" and "daring" were associated with the wine tasted in the dark-VR environment (Figure 3). Berridge and Kringelbach [36] stated that the environmental factors could change the human cognitive ability to elaborate the psychological representation of pleasant events, which might increase the perception of richness and taste by shaping the emotions that are felt toward the stimuli. This means that personal emotions are closely related to the environment in which they occur, and different consumption situations may have a significant effect on consumers' emotional responses [16].

The interaction between product and environment can affect the elicited emotions of consumers during the tasting. Piqueras-Fiszman and Jaeger [37] showed that the contextual scenario is, in fact, a trigger of emotional changes in the consumers. The scenarios that are considered more appropriate to consumers for food consumption had more positive elicited emotions compared to inappropriate contextual environments, which can produce more negative emotional terms associated with the product [37]. In the present study, the use of real restaurant environments triggered more positive elicited emotions compared to that of the traditional booths, which can be an indication of the

appropriateness of the restaurant environments when tasting wine samples. In a similar study, Park and Farr [38] showed that consumers' emotions were affected by the lighting conditions of the testing environment. Changes in mood and emotions can also affect consumers' taste perception. In the present study, consumers perceived the wine sample to be higher in floral aroma and lower in astringency in the real dark-restaurant environment compared to that in the traditional booths. The real dark-restaurant environment was also responsible for generating positive emotions such as "enthusiastic", "glad", and "warm" when tasting the wine sample (Figure 3). Noel and Dando [39] showed that positive emotions were associated with increased sweetness and decreased acidity in ice-cream products, concluding that modulating taste perception can play an important role in emotional eating. In the present study, the overall liking of the wine sample was significantly and positively correlated with the perceived floral aroma and sweetness (*r* = 0.3 to 0.6), and negatively correlated with astringency (*r* = −0.2 to −0.4) for all testing environments (Table S1, Table S2, Table S3, Table S4 and Table S5).

In the present study, the purchase intent of the wine sample was marginally affected by the change in the environment. Consumers' decisions to buy a product are affected by several extrinsic factors such as packaging, logo, and color [40,41]. These external factors, combined with the contextual effects of the environment, can greatly modify the purchasing behaviors of consumers. Although traditional laboratory environments are designed to collect data, minimizing the influences of external contextual effects, these environments may lack ecological validity during the tasting. The use of real environments is an option to measure those external factors, but the experimental conditions might produce several variables that are difficult to control [42]. Virtual reality offers a novel solution to measure the effects of environmental factors and having controlled laboratory conditions.

Boesveldt et al. [43] stated that the development of the sensory perception is closely linked with the environment. Sensory perception plays an important role in the acceptance or rejection of food and drinks. Moreover, hedonic responses and preferences can be affected by the familiarity toward the food products that consumers have [28]. However, purchasing decisions of foods can be affected by the surrounding elements of different consumption environments, which means that each product can have a specific consumption environment that is suitable for it [37]. King et al. [44] found that the dining environment greatly affected the consumers' acceptance and choice of products. García-Segovia et al. [45] stated that the table decoration and dining place also affected consumers' acceptance and perception of foods. In the present study, the real environment had a greater effect on participants' perceptions of floral aroma and astringency compared to that of the VR environments. However, the emotions elicited by the wine sample were greatly affected by the VR environments; in particular, this effect was more evident for the dark environment. Future studies are needed to evaluate the effects of other environmental factors such as music and consumers' interactions with the use of novel virtual reality technologies.
