The environment influences whether high-fat foods are associated with palatable or with unhealthy

Awareness and Calibration: The Role of Descriptive Norms and Social Desirability in Accurate IAT Score Predictions of Food Items vs. Social Groups

Extending research that people are able to predict the patterns of their social group biases on Implicit Association Tests (IATs), we let participants predict and complete IATs toward five different food item pairs and compared the results with the social-groups domain. Participants predicted the patterns of their IAT scores with similar accuracy in both domains, suggesting similar internal awareness (evidenced by comparable within-subjects correlations), even though food evaluations followed less descriptively-normative patterns. At the same time, participants were better-calibrated in communicating their evaluations in the domain of food than social groups (evidenced by higher between-subjects correlations). This discrepancy may partly stem from participants' tendency to refrain from using harsh labels when predicting social group biases, despite their demonstrated awareness of them: IAT scores predicted as "moderate" or "strong" for food preferences tended to be labeled "mild" for social groups. Discussion centers on the importance of distinguishing between awareness and calibration.

Effects of Mindset and Dietary Restraint on Attention Bias for Food and Food Intake

Evidence for attention bias (AB) for food in restrained eaters is inconsistent. A person’s mindset related to food – that is, whether someone focuses on the hedonic or health aspects of food – might be an overlooked influence on AB for food, possibly explaining the inconsistency in the literature. Fluctuations between a hedonic versus a health mindset might be strongest in restrained eaters, who have a conflicted relationship with food. We investigated the effect of mindset and dietary restraint on AB for food and food intake. We hypothesized that AB for food, as reflected in eye-movement measures and manual response latencies, as well as food intake, would be larger in the hedonic than in the health mindset, most strongly in participants scoring high on dietary restraint. Moreover, we expected a positive correlation between AB for food and food intake, especially in the hedonic mindset. We used short video clips to induce either a health or hedonic mindset. Subsequently, participants (n = 122) performed a modified additional singleton task with pictures of high-caloric food vs neutral pictures as irrelevant distractors. Next, food intake was measured in a bogus taste test. We found no evidence for an AB towards food, nor any moderation by either mindset or dietary restraint. Food intake tended to be higher for participants scoring higher on dietary restraint, but effects were not moderated by mindset. Response-latency based AB for food tended to correlate positively with food intake in the hedonic mindset. Taken together, our hypotheses regarding AB for food were largely not confirmed. We provide suggestions on how to improve upon the specific implementations of our AB task and mindset manipulation, to strengthen future research in this field.

Food Captures Attention, but Not the Eyes: An Eye-Tracking Study on Mindset and BMI’s Impact on Attentional Capture by High-Caloric Visual Food Stimuli

Obesity is a worldwide pandemic and theories propose that attentional bias (AB) for food triggers craving and overeating, especially for people with obesity. However, empirical evidence is inconsistent, which may be due to methodological diversity and the double-sided nature of high-caloric palatable foods. That is, these foods simultaneously have a high hedonic and a low health value. So, depending on context and/or emotional state, people’s mindset while viewing foods may alternate between hedonic (taste) and health (calories) values, possibly affecting AB for food in opposite directions. This study tests how mindset and BMI (Body Mass Index) influences AB and food intake. We expect greater AB for food and more food intake in the hedonic compared to the health mindset, especially for people with obesity. Mindsets were induced using short video-clips in two sessions in counterbalanced order. Participants (35 with a healthy-weight-category BMI, 31 with obesity) performed a modified Additional Singleton paradigm where they searched for a neutral target among neutral fillers. On 90% of the trials, either a food or a neutral distractor appeared. Response latencies to the target and eye-movements to the distractor were recorded. Dependent variables included: response latencies, and eye-movement variables on the distractor: fixations (%), 1st fixation duration, dwell-time. Food intake was assessed in a bogus taste test. No significant effects emerged from the eye-movements analysis, whereas the analysis of response latencies showed an AB for food, not significantly moderated by BMI or mindset. Food intake was affected by mindset partly as expected, as participants ate more in the hedonic than in the health mindset when the hedonic mindset was induced in the second session. One AB measure (fixations) correlated positively with food intake. Finally, food captured attention – but not the eyes – and mindset affects food intake partly as expected.

Situating desire: Situational cues affect desire for food through eating simulations

How do situations influence food desire? Although eating typically occurs in rich background situations, research on food desire often focuses on the properties of foods and consumers, rather than on the situations in which eating takes place. Here, we take a grounded cognition perspective and suggest that a situation that is congruent with consuming a food increases simulations of eating it, which, in turn, affect desire, and the expected and actual liking of the food. We tested this idea in four pre-registered experiments (N = 524). Participants processed an image of a food presented in a congruent situation, an incongruent situation, or no background situation. Compared to the incongruent situation, the congruent situation increased expected liking of the food and desire, and this was partially or fully mediated by eating simulations. The congruent situation also increased salivation, a physiological indicator of preparing to eat. However, there was only weak and indirect evidence for congruence effects on actual liking of the food when tasted. These findings show that situational cues can affect desire for food through eating simulations. Thus, background situations play an important but understudied role in human food desires. We address implications for research using food images, and for applications to promote healthy and sustainable eating behaviour.

Touchscreen-based assessment of food approach biases: Investigating reliability and item-specific preferences

Strong cravings for unhealthy foods and implicit tendencies to approach them threaten the physical and mental health of vulnerable populations. Yet, implicit measures of food approach tendencies have methodological limitations, as existing approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) are often unreliable and require specialized hardware. We propose a novel method to measure approach biases: on a touchscreen, participants slide their hand either toward a food item (and away from control images) or away from it (and toward control images) in separate blocks. Adequate attention to the stimuli is ensured by the coupling of stimulus category to the required response. We found that this touchscreen-variant of the AAT yielded reliable bias scores when approach and avoidance were defined as movements relative to the stimulus rather than to the body. Compared to control images, we found an approach bias for low-calorie foods but not for high-calorie foods. This bias additionally varied on a food-by-food basis depending on the participant's desire to eat individual food items. Correlations with state and trait cravings were inconclusive. Future research needs to address the order effects that were found, in which participants avoiding foods in the first block showed larger biases than participants approaching food in the first block, likely due to insufficient opportunity to practice the task. Our findings highlight the need for approach bias retraining paradigms to use personalized stimulus sets. The task can enrich the methodological repertoire of research on eating disorders, obesity and cognitive bias modification.

A Systematic Review Of Implicit Attitudes And Their Neural Correlates In Eating Behaviour

An increasing number of studies suggests that implicit attitudes toward food and body shape predict eating behaviour and characterize patients with eating disorders (EDs). However, literature has not been previously analysed, thus differences between patients with EDs and healthy controls and the level of automaticity of the processes involved in implicit attitudes are still matters of debate. The present systematic review aimed to synthetize current evidence from papers investigating implicit attitudes towards food and body in healthy and EDs populations. PubMed, EMBASE (Ovid), PsycINFO, Web of Science and Scopus were systematically screened and 183 studies using different indirect paradigms were included in the qualitative analysis. The majority of studies reported negative attitudes towards overweight/obese body images in healthy and EDs samples and weight bias as a diffuse stereotypical evaluation. Implicit food attitudes are consistently reported as valid predictors of eating behaviour. Few studies on the neurobiological correlates showed neurostimulation effects on implicit attitudes, but the automaticity at brain level of implicit evaluations remains an open area of research. In conclusion, implicit attitudes are relevant measures of eating behaviour in healthy and clinical settings, although evidence about their neural correlates is limited.

The affective priming paradigm as an indirect measure of food attitudes and related choice behaviour

In this Registered Report, we assessed the utility of the affective priming paradigm (APP) as an indirect measure of food attitudes and related choice behaviour in two separate cohorts. Participants undertook a speeded evaluative categorization task in which target words were preceded by food primes that differed in terms of affective congruence with the target, explicit liking (most liked or least liked), and healthiness (healthy or unhealthy). Non-food priming effects were tested as a manipulation check, and the relationship between food priming effects and impulsive choice behaviour was also investigated using a binary food choice task. As predicted, priming effects were observed for both healthy and unhealthy foods, but there was no difference in the magnitude of these effects. This may suggest that the paradigm is most sensitive to affective, but not cognitive, components of attitudes (i.e., healthiness), but alternative theoretical explanations and implications of this finding are discussed. Food and non-food priming effects were observed in both reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER) data, but contrary to expectations, we found no association between food RT priming effects and choice behaviour. All findings from confirmatory analyses regarding RT and ER priming effects, and the absence of the expected correlations between priming effects and impulsive food choices, were successfully replicated in the online cohort of participants. Overall, this study confirms the robustness of the APP as an indirect measure of food liking and raises questions about its applied value for research of eating behaviours.

Learned Overeating: Applying Principles of Pavlovian Conditioning to Explain and Treat Overeating

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

This review provides an overview of recent findings relating to the role of Pavlovian conditioning in food cue reactivity, including its application to overeating and weight loss interventions.

RECENT FINDINGS

Both in the laboratory and in real life, cue-elicited appetitive reactivity (e.g., eating desires) can be easily learned, but (long-term) extinction is more difficult. New findings suggest impaired appetitive learning in obesity, which might be causally related to overeating. The clinical analogue of extinction-cue exposure therapy-effectively reduces cue-elicited cravings and overeating. While its working mechanisms are still unclear, some studies suggest that reducing overeating expectancies is important.

SUMMARY

Pavlovian learning theory provides a still undervalued theoretical framework of how cravings and overeating can be learned and how they might be effectively tackled. Future studies should aim to elucidate inter-individual differences in Pavlovian conditioning, study ways to strengthen (long-term) extinction, and investigate the working mechanisms of cue exposure therapy.

Altered appetitive conditioning in overweight and obese women

Overweight and obese individuals show increased psychological and physiological reactivity to food cues and many of them have difficulties in achieving long-term weight loss. The current study tests whether abnormalities in the learning and extinction of appetitive responses to food cues might be responsible for this. Overweight/obese and healthy weight women completed a differential appetitive conditioning task using food as rewards, while eating expectancies, eating desires, conditioned stimulus evaluations, salivation, and electrodermal responses were assessed during an acquisition and extinction phase. Results suggested reduced discriminative conditioning in the overweight/obese group, as reflected by a worse acquisition of differential eating desires and no successful acquisition of differential evaluative responses. Some evidence was also found for impaired contingency learning in overweight and obese individuals. No group differences in conditioned salivation and skin conductance responses were found and no compelling evidence for differences in extinction was found as well. In sum, the current findings indicate that overweight and obesity may be characterized by reduced appetitive conditioning. It is suggested that this could be causally related to overeating via stronger context conditioning or a tendency towards overgeneralization in overweight and obese individuals.

The Color Red Supports Avoidance Reactions to Unhealthy Food

Empirical evidence suggests that the color red acts like an implicit avoidance cue in food contexts. Thus specific colors seem to guide the implicit evaluation of food items. We built upon this research by investigating the implicit meaning of color (red vs. green) in an approach-avoidance task with healthy and unhealthy food items. Thus, we examined the joint evaluative effects of color and food: Participants had to categorize food items by approach-avoidance reactions, according to their healthfulness. Items were surrounded by task-irrelevant red or green circles. We found that the implicit meaning of the traffic light colors influenced participants' reactions to the food items. The color red (compared to green) facilitated automatic avoidance reactions to unhealthy foods. By contrast, approach behavior toward healthy food items was not moderated by color. Our findings suggest that traffic light colors can act as implicit cues that guide automatic behavioral reactions to food.

Re-training automatic action tendencies to approach cigarettes among adolescent smokers: a pilot study

BACKGROUND

This pilot study conducted a preliminary examination of whether Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), a computerized task to retrain cognitive-approach biases towards smoking stimuli (a) changed approach bias for cigarettes, and (b) improved smoking cessation outcomes in adolescent smokers.

METHODS

Sixty adolescent smokers received four weeks of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for smoking cessation, with CBM (90% avoidance/10% approach for smoking stimuli and 10% avoidance/90% approach for neutral stimuli) or sham (50% avoidance/50% approach for smoking and neutral stimuli) training in the Netherlands (n = 42) and the United States (n = 18).

RESULTS

While we did not observe changes in action tendencies related to CBM, adolescents with higher smoking approach biases at baseline had greater decreases in approach biases at follow-up, compared to adolescents with smoking avoidance biases, regardless of treatment condition (p = 0.01). Intent-to-treat (ITT) analyses showed that CBM, when compared with sham trended toward higher end-of-treatment, biochemically-confirmed, seven-day point prevalence abstinence, (17.2% vs. 3.2%, p = 0.071). ITT analysis also showed that regardless of treatment condition, cotinine level (p = 0.045) and average number of cigarette smoked (p ≤ 0.001) significantly decreased over the course of treatment.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings from this pilot study suggests that re-training approach biases toward cigarettes shows promise for smoking cessation among adolescent smokers. Future research should utilize larger samples and increased distinction between CBM and sham conditions, and examine mechanisms underlying the CBM approach.

Similarities and differences between eating disorders and obese patients in a virtual environment for normalizing eating patterns

Virtual reality has demonstrated promising results in the treatment of eating disorders (ED); however, few studies have examined its usefulness in treating obesity. The aim of this study was to compare ED and obese patients on their reality judgment of a virtual environment (VE) designed to normalize their eating pattern. A second objective was to study which variables predicted the reality of the experience of eating a virtual forbidden-fattening food. ED patients, obese patients, and a non-clinical group (N=62) experienced a non-immersive VE, and then completed reality judgment and presence measures. All participants rated the VE with similar scores for quality, interaction, engagement, and ecological validity; however, ED patients obtained the highest scores on emotional involvement, attention, reality judgment/presence, and negative effects. The obese group gave the lowest scores to reality judgment/presence, satisfaction and sense of physical space, and they held an intermediate position in the attribution of reality to virtually eating a "fattening" food. The palatability of a virtual food was predicted by attention capturing and belonging to the obese group, while the attribution of reality to the virtual eating was predicted by engagement and belonging to the ED group. This study offers preliminary results about the differential impact on ED and obese patients of the exposure to virtual food, and about the need to implement a VE that can be useful as a virtual lab for studying eating behavior and treating obesity.

Distinguishing the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes to improve prediction of food choices

Eating behaviors largely result from automatic processes. Yet, in existing research, automatic or implicit attitudes toward food often fail to predict eating behaviors. Applying findings in cognitive neuroscience research, we propose and find that a central reason why implicit attitudes toward food are not good predictors of eating behaviors is that implicit attitudes are driven by two distinct constructs that often have diverging evaluative consequences: the automatic affective reactions to food (e.g., tastiness; the affective basis of implicit attitudes) and the automatic cognitive reactions to food (e.g., healthiness; the cognitive basis of implicit attitudes). More importantly, we find that the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes directly and uniquely influence actual food choices under different conditions. While the affective basis of implicit attitude is the main driver of food choices, it is the only driver when cognitive resources during choice are limited. The cognitive basis of implicit attitudes uniquely influences food choices when cognitive resources during choice are plentiful but only for participants low in impulsivity. Researchers interested in automatic processes in eating behaviors could thus benefit by distinguishing between the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes.

Priming of conflicting motivational orientations in heavy drinkers: robust effects on self-report but not implicit measures

We report results from three experimental studies that investigated the independence of approach and avoidance motivational orientations for alcohol, both of which operate within controlled and automatic cognitive processes. In order to prime their approach or avoidance motivational orientations, participants watched brief videos, the content of which (positive or negative depictions of alcohol, or neutral) varied by experimental group. Immediately after watching the videos, participants completed self-report (Approach and Avoidance of Alcohol Questionnaire; all studies) and implicit (visual probe task in study 1, stimulus-response compatibility task in studies 2 and 3) measures of alcohol-related approach and avoidance. In study 3, we incorporated an additional experimental manipulation of thought suppression in an attempt to maximize the influence of the videos on implicit measures. Findings were consistent across all three studies: increases in self-reported approach inclinations were mirrored by decreases in avoidance inclinations, and vice versa. However, a combined analysis of data from all studies demonstrated that changes in approach inclinations were partially independent of changes in avoidance inclinations. There were no effects on implicit alcohol-related processing biases, although methodological issues may partially account for these findings. Our findings demonstrate that subjective approach and avoidance inclinations for alcohol tend to fluctuate in parallel, but changes in approach inclinations may be partially independent from changes in avoidance inclinations. We discuss methodological issues that may partially account for our findings.

Reduce temptation or resist it? Experienced temptation mediates the relationship between implicit evaluations of unhealthy snack foods and subsequent intake

A more negative implicit evaluation of unhealthy food stimuli and a more positive implicit evaluation of a weight-management goal have been shown to predict lower consumption of unhealthy food. However, the associations between these evaluations, temptation to indulge and consumption of unhealthy food remain unclear. The current study investigated whether temptation would mediate the relationship between implicit food and goal evaluations and consumption (resembling an antecedent-focused route to self-control of eating), or whether those evaluations would moderate the relationship between temptation and consumption (resembling a response-focused route). A sample of 156 women (17-25 years), who tried to manage their weight through healthy eating, completed two implicit association tasks assessing implicit food and goal evaluations, respectively. Intake of four energy-dense snack foods was measured in a task disguised as a taste test, and participants reported the strength of experienced temptation to indulge in the snacks offered. Negative implicit food evaluation was associated with lower snack intake, and temptation mediated this relationship. Implicit goal evaluation was unrelated to both temptation strength and snack consumption. The findings contribute to an understanding of how negative implicit unhealthy food evaluation relates to lower consumption, namely through the mediation of temptation to indulge in those foods.

Worry or craving? A selective review of evidence for food-related attention biases in obese individuals, eating-disorder patients, restrained eaters and healthy samples

Living in an ‘obesogenic’ environment poses a serious challenge for weight maintenance. However, many people are able to maintain a healthy weight indicating that not everybody is equally susceptible to the temptations of this food environment. The way in which someone perceives and reacts to food cues, that is, cognitive processes, could underlie differences in susceptibility. An attention bias for food could be such a cognitive factor that contributes to overeating. However, an attention bias for food has also been implicated with restrained eating and eating-disorder symptomatology. The primary aim of the present review was to determine whether an attention bias for food is specifically related to obesity while also reviewing evidence for attention biases in eating-disorder patients, restrained eaters and healthy-weight individuals. Another aim was to systematically examine how selective attention for food relates (causally) to eating behaviour. Current empirical evidence on attention bias for food within obese samples, eating-disorder patients, and, even though to a lesser extent, in restrained eaters is contradictory. However, present experimental studies provide relatively consistent evidence that an attention bias for food contributes to subsequent food intake. This review highlights the need to distinguish not only between different (temporal) attention bias components, but also to take different motivations (craving v. worry) and their impact on attentional processing into account. Overall, the current state of research suggests that biased attention could be one important cognitive mechanism by which the food environment tempts us into overeating.

Time course of electrocortical food-cue responses during cognitive regulation of craving

In our current obesogenic environment, exposure to visual food-cues can easily lead to craving and overeating because short-term, pleasurable effects of food intake dominate over the anticipated long-term adverse effects such as weight gain and associated health problems. Here we contrasted these two conditions during food-cue presentation while acquiring event-related potentials (ERPs) and subjective craving ratings. Female participants (n = 25) were presented with either high-calorie (HC) or low-calorie (LC) food images under instructions to imagine either immediate (NOW) or long-term effects (LATER) of consumption. On subjective ratings for HC foods, the LATER perspective reduced cravings as compared to the NOW perspective. For LC foods, by contrast, craving increased under the LATER perspective. Early ERPs (occipital N1, 150-200 ms) were sensitive to food type but not to perspective. Late ERPs (late positive potential, LPP, 350-550 ms) were larger in the HC-LATER condition than in all other conditions, possibly indicating that a cognitive focus on negative long-term consequences induced negative arousal. This enhancement for HC-LATER attenuated to the level of the LC conditions during the later slow wave (550-3000 ms), but amplitude in the HC-NOW condition was larger than in all other conditions, possibly due to a delayed appetitive response. Across all conditions, LPP amplitudes were positively correlated with self-reported emotional eating. In sum, results reveal that regulation effects are secondary to an early attentional analysis of food type and dynamically evolve over time. Adopting a long-term perspective on eating might promote a healthier food choice across a range of food types.

Of mice and men: what animal research can tell us about context effects on automatic responses in humans

Automatic responses play a central role in many areas of psychology. Counter to views that such responses are relatively rigid and inflexible, a large body of research has shown that they are highly context-sensitive. Research on animal learning and animal behavior has a strong potential to provide a deeper understanding of such context effects by revealing remarkable parallels between the functional properties of automatic responses in human and nonhuman animals. These parallels involve the contextual modulation of attitude formation and change (automatic evaluation), and the role of contextual contingencies in shaping the particular action tendencies in response to a stimulus (automatic behavior). Theoretical concepts of animal research not only provide novel insights into the processes and representations underlying context effects on automatic responses in humans; they also offer new perspectives on the interface between affect, cognition, and motivation.

Implicit and explicit alcohol cognitions and observed alcohol consumption: three studies in (semi)naturalistic drinking settings

AIMS

  Dual-process models imply that alcohol use is related to implicit as well as explicit cognitive processes. Few studies have tested whether both types of processes are related to ad libitum drinking. In a series of three studies, we tested whether both implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions predicted the amount of alcohol consumed in an ad libitum (semi)naturalistic drinking situation.

DESIGN

  Two experimental studies used trained confederates (same-sex peers) who consumed either alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages, while observing participants' drinking behaviour in a 30-minute session. The third study involved observations of participants' alcohol use during a 45-minute session in which participants spent time with five to seven friends.

SETTING

  A (semi)naturalistic drinking setting, a laboratory bar.

PARTICIPANTS

  Participants were undergraduates recruited at Radboud University (study 1: n = 115; study 2: n = 121; study 3: n = 200).

MEASUREMENTS

  We used coding of drinking behaviour from observations, questionnaire data on positive alcohol expectancies and alcohol use patterns and implicit association tests to assess alcohol associations.

FINDINGS

  Implicit associations were not related to observed alcohol use, whereas explicit positive expectancies were related positively to observed alcohol use in study 1 and study 2.

CONCLUSIONS

  Among undergraduate students in (semi)naturalistic drinking settings with peers, implicit alcohol-related cognitions do not predict the amount of alcohol consumed.

Goal Priming in Dieters: Recent Insights and Applications

What are the psychological mechanisms that make dieting so challenging in our food-rich living environment? Social psychological research on goal priming provides a useful framework for answering this question, as well as implications for how to enhance dieting success. This review presents and discusses recent research which shows that attractive food cues prime the hedonic eating goal in dieters, and thus facilitate overeating. However, external cues priming the goal of weight control can be used to offset these effects and thus to facilitate dieting success, as is demonstrated in both field and laboratory experiments. In addition, recent strategies to prevent hedonic effects of attractive food, such as mindful attention, can facilitate self-regulation. These recent advances in our understanding of dieting behavior have theoretical and practical implications for how successful dieting can be facilitated, both by means of individual strategies, as well as by environmental changes.

Deliberative and spontaneous cognitive processes associated with HIV risk behavior

Dual process models of decision-making suggest that behavior is mediated by a spontaneous behavior selection process or by a more deliberative evaluation of behavioral options. We examined whether the deliberative system moderates the influence of spontaneous cognition on HIV-risk behaviors. A measure of spontaneous sex-related associations (word association), a measure of deliberative working memory capacity (operation span), and two measures of sexual behavior (condom use and multiple partners) were assessed in a cross-sectional study among 490 adult drug offenders. Significant effects were observed among men but not among women in two latent interaction models. In a novel finding, the accessibility of spontaneous safe sex-related associations was significantly more predictive of condom use among men with higher working memory capacity than among men with lower capacity. These results have implications for the design of interventions to promote safe sex practices.

Implicit cognition and addiction: a tool for explaining paradoxical behavior

Research on implicit cognition and addiction has expanded greatly during the past decade. This research area provides new ways to understand why people engage in behaviors that they know are harmful or counterproductive in the long run. Implicit cognition takes a different view from traditional cognitive approaches to addiction by assuming that behavior is often not a result of a reflective decision that takes into account the pros and cons known by the individual. Instead of a cognitive algebra integrating many cognitions relevant to choice, implicit cognition assumes that the influential cognitions are the ones that are spontaneously activated during critical decision points. This selective review highlights many of the consistent findings supporting predictive effects of implicit cognition on substance use and abuse in adolescents and adults; reveals a recent integration with dual-process models; outlines the rapid evolution of different measurement tools; and introduces new routes for intervention.

Who likes it more? Restrained eaters' implicit attitudes towards food

Previous work has been unclear as to how restrained eating is related to implicit attitudes towards food. The present paper introduces a new variant of the affective priming paradigm to measure implicit attitudes towards food among restrained and unrestrained eaters, using food pictures as primes and emoticons as targets. Results of two studies show that while unrestrained eaters evaluate palatable foods more positively than neutral and unpalatable foods, restrained eaters do not. In addition, it is shown that restrained eaters have stronger evaluations of the negative aspects of palatable food, and this influences their food attitudes. Thus, the present findings suggest that restrained eaters' chronic goal of dieting impacts their implicit attitude towards food items via their perception of the negative aspects of palatable food. These results are discussed with regard to the role of attitudes in the regulation of eating behavior.

Early associations with palatable foods in overweight and obesity are not disinhibition related but restraint related

Obese people prefer and overconsume high-fat foods. At the same time they often attempt to lose weight. In two studies we investigated relations between palatable high-fat food words and disinhibition related concepts (study 1) and palatable high-fat food words and restraint related concepts (study 2) within the semantic priming paradigm. In study 1, 24 overweight/obese and 19 healthy weight women participated. There was no association between palatable high-fat food words and disinhibition. In study 2, 27 obese and 29 healthy weight women participated. The presentation of palatable high-fat food words facilitated the accessibility of restraint related concepts as hypothesized, but independent of weight status. Clearly, early associations with palatable high-fat food words are restraint related in both healthy weight and obese people.

High-fat diet exposure increases dopamine D2 receptor and decreases dopamine transporter receptor binding density in the nucleus accumbens and caudate putamen of mice

This experiment examined dopamine D2 receptor and its transporter (DAT) density in mice fed a high-fat or low-fat diet for twenty days as well as fed twenty days of high-fat diet then changed to low-fat diet for one and seven days. Quantitative autoradiography revealed that twenty days of high-fat diet consumption significantly increased D2 receptor and decreased DAT density in the dorsal and ventral parts of the caudal caudate putamen (D2: 32% and 35% respectively, DAT: 33.3% and 28.8% respectively) compared with low-fat diet. High-fat feeding also increased D2 binding in the nucleus accumbens shell (36%). D2 receptor and DAT density remained unchanged following reversal of the diets from high-fat to low-fat diet. The high-fat diet induced increase of D2 receptor and decrease of DAT binding may have occurred due to defensive control over dopaminergic activity in response to a positive energy balance.

Do children with obesity implicitly identify with sedentariness and fat food?

We investigated whether youngsters with obesity (n=39) differed from a control group (n=39) in their self-reported attitudes towards and in their implicit identification with physical activity and food. Self-reported attitudes were assessed using a rating scale; implicit identification was assessed using a self-concept Implicit Association Task (IAT). Results revealed a marked group difference on the implicit identification with food: Only youngsters without obesity identified themselves more with non-fat food than with fat food.

Effects of temptations on the affective salience of weight control goals

Despite the value of weight control goals, the maintenance of healthy eating habits represents a challenge for most. Self-regulatory efforts are often challenged by the presence of high-risk cues (e.g., tempting foods) which provide short-term positive outcomes at the expense of these long-term health objectives. The current study examined contextual influences on self-regulation failure by exploring the effect of cues on an indirect measure of goal value. Two experiments were conducted with undergraduate students which examined the effect of temptation cues on the evaluation of information related to the goal of weight control. Results of Study 1 provided preliminary evidence for the utility of this task as an indirect measure of goal value and showed that food-related primes slowed evaluation response times for weight control-related targets. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that temptation cues may not only decrease the affective salience of weight control related information but increase the salience of information related to the goal of affect enhancement. These results suggest that self-regulation failure may be influenced by contextual changes in the value of health-related goals. Implications for prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.