Research Project 2: Human thresholds for characterizing flavors and impact on behavior

香料在塑造消费者对烟草产品的看法方面发挥着重要作用。味道非常好。 在电子尼古丁递送系统(END)使用者中很常见，通常被认为是主要原因 供他们使用。关于电子液体中的调味品的一个担忧是，它们可能会掩盖负面的感官 经验，但要正确评估这一假设，客观、可靠和有效的测量 感官效果和对味道的感知是必要的。在用户中体验风味是一种 嗅觉、味觉和三叉神经效应的结合。口味也可能影响期望值(即， 烟草制品周围可能影响的认知表征和积极感觉的期望 吸烟的影响(例如，外观、感觉和味道)可以预测吸烟行为和尝试的意愿。 然而，这种整合很难衡量和/或量化。这项研究的前提是味道可能 与“间接”毒性现象有关。也就是说，无论调味品是否有证据表明 尽管它们具有生物学意义上的毒性，但它们可能会通过其他方式增加危害，例如增加吸引力， 降低风险感知，或掩盖可能导致用户停止使用的刺激性或刺激性。我们 寻求1)培养专家(根据行业最佳实践进行培训)和消费者(未经培训)感官 用于识别和评估电子液体中的特征风味的小组；以及2)检查 调味品对使用地形、蒸发的主观效果和当前感官体验的影响 最终用户。FDA在香料方面有许多工具可供使用，从产品标准到产品标准 将禁止在香烟中表征香料的禁令扩大到其他产品。是否禁止的决定 某些调味剂以及在哪里设置这样的最高水平必须是以证据为基础的，并且可以由这两个因素来告知 毒理学和行为学研究，如这里提出的。

Flavors play an important role in shaping consumer perceptions of tobacco products. Flavors are extremely common among electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) users and are often named as a primary reason for their use. A concern about flavorings in e-liquids is that they could serve to mask negative sensory experiences, but to properly evaluate this hypothesis, objective, reliable, and valid measures of both the sensory effects and the perception of flavor are needed. The experience of flavor among users is a combination of olfactory, gustatory, and trigeminal effects. Flavors may also influence expectancies (that is, cognitive representations of likely effects) around tobacco products and expectancies of positive sensory effects of smoking (e.g., look, feel, and taste) are predictive of smoking behavior and willingness to try. However, this integration is difficult to measure and/or quantify. The premise of this study is that flavors might be related to the phenomenon of `indirect' toxicity. That is, regardless of whether flavorings show evidence of toxicity in a biological sense, they may nonetheless increase harm by other means, such as increasing appeal, decreasing risk perceptions, or masking harshness or irritation that might lead users to discontinue use. We seek to 1) Develop expert (trained per industry best practices) and consumer (untrained) sensory panels to identify and assess characterizing flavors in e-liquids; and 2) Examine the effects of flavorings on use topography, subjective effects of vaping, and sensory experience among current ENDS users. FDA has a number of tools at its disposal with regard to flavors, ranging from product standards to extending the ban on characterizing flavors in cigarettes to other products. The decision whether to ban certain flavorants and where to set such maximal levels must be evidence-based and can be informed by both toxicological and behavioral research, such as proposed herein.