Facial electromyography and subjective liking data from 70 New Zealand participants in response to food images and chocolate samples

This article describes a dataset of facial electromyography and subjective liking data from 70 New Zealand participants used in the study “An unfamiliar presence reduces facial disgust responses to food stimuli” by Nath, Cannon and Philipp [1]. Participants’ facial muscle activity from zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and levator labii superioris was recorded as they viewed and rated food images, and tasted samples of chocolate. Half of the participants were seated alone, and the other half was seated in the presence of the researcher. The data allows for investigations into the effect of social context on hedonic ratings and facial responses to food, and an exploration into the individual factors contributing to differences in facial reactivity. The data includes raw EMG files generated by Acqknowledge 4.2, raw subjective liking files generated by PsychoPy, a table of participant information, the food images stimuli, the PsychoPy code used for stimuli presentation, and the R scripts used to filter, aggregate and analyse the data. Keywords: Facial electromyography, Food preference, Food liking, Social context, Implicit emotion