Emotional value has become a focal point in marketing strategies nowadays. Previous studies have demonstrated that incorporating emotional value into products or services can significantly enhance consumers’ willingness to purchase and pay. Emotional value also plays an increasingly important role in the restaurant industry. However, existing strategies primarily emphasize environmental design, dish presentation, and service interactions. The emotional value embedded in menu content descriptions remains underexplored. To address this gap, the present study employed eye-tracking technology to explore how emotional versus factual menu descriptions influence consumers’ visual attention patterns. The results revealed that when selecting main courses, participants showed a preference for factual descriptions, spending a longer total fixation duration in this section. In contrast, for staple foods and beverages, emotional descriptions attracted attention more quickly and maintained it more effectively, getting shorter time to first fixation, longer total fixation duration, and higher fixation counts. Further analysis explored potential cognitive mechanisms underlying these different attentional strategies. This study extends the application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by validating its predictive utility at the millisecond level through eye-tracking data. The findings also offer practical implications for menu design, highlighting the strategic use of emotional value as a marketing tool across different menu categories.

Chiang Alyssa. Emotional and Factual Language in Restaurant Menus: Insights from Eye-Tracking. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2025), Vol. 8, Issue 11: 89-93. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2025.081115.

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