Variety Salience and Enjoyment of Repetitiously Consumed Foods: a Field Experiment.

BACKGROUND: The formation of healthy eating habits is supported by repeatedly eating specific foods, but repetition can also reduce enjoyment of those foods. Making the variety in one's diet salient increases enjoyment of repetitiously consumed foods in a lab setting. Therefore, in a longitudinal field experiment, we tested a brief intervention to remind participants of the variety in their diet. We hypothesized that increasing salience of dietary variety would prevent declines in enjoyment of the food and increase the likelihood that participants would be willing to eat the food again later. METHOD: Participants (n = 139) ate a granola bar each day for 2 weeks. Before eating it, participants randomly assigned to the treatment condition recalled other recently consumed foods (to increase salience of dietary variety). Control subjects recalled variety in an unrelated domain (music). Participants reported their enjoyment of the granola bar after they ate it each day, and in a lab session after the study ended, the number of granola bars they took from a selection of snacks was counted. RESULTS: Self-reported feelings of enjoyment declined steadily, and contrary to our first hypothesis, increasing salience of dietary variety did not prevent this decline. Increasing salience of dietary variety did increase the likelihood that participants would choose to take the same kind of granola bar 2 weeks later. CONCLUSION: Brief exercises that make variety in one's diet more salient may not prevent reductions in enjoyment of a repetitiously consumed food, but may still support continued consumption of the food.

Eating up cognitive resources: Does attentional consumption lead to food consumption?

What is the role played by attentional load in eating? Does attending to an unrelated task generally lead to overeating, perhaps by preventing individuals from focusing on a goal to limit consumption? Or does such attentional diversion typically lead to reductions in eating, perhaps by preventing people from noticing tempting features of relevant food cues? Past research has supported each of these two propositions, but comparisons between existing studies have been hampered to the extent that various experimental manipulations differ in the degree to which they occupy attention, as well as differing in the particular type of attentional resources they exploit. To resolve existing discrepancies in the literature, in a series of studies, we made use of a working memory manipulation, the n-back task (Kirchner, 1958), that can be systematically modified to induce varying levels of cognitive load, allowing for rigorous comparisons of the effects of different levels of attentional load on eating. These studies revealed a complex pattern of results. Analysis of findings from three studies employing within-subjects designs documented a linear relationship, in that participants consumed less food when completing a higher cognitive-load task than when completing a lower cognitive-load task. Three studies employing between-subjects designs highlighted a less consistent pattern of results, but when combined in a mini-meta-analysis, suggested the opposite linear relationship, with participants assigned to higher cognitive-load conditions generally consuming more food than participants assigned to lower cognitive-load conditions. We conducted two additional studies to reconcile these conflicting patterns of data. Neither finding received unequivocal support, although both studies found that participants ate less when engaged in higher cognitive-load tasks than lower cognitive-load tasks. The precise nature of the relationship between attentional load and eating remains elusive.

An in-home intervention of parent-implemented strategies to increase child vegetable intake: results from a non-randomized cluster-allocated community trial.

BACKGROUND: Less than 2% of children in the U.S., ages 9-13, meet the minimum dietary recommendations for vegetable intake. The home setting provides potential opportunities to promote dietary behavior change among children, yet limited trials exist with child vegetable intake as a primary outcome. Strategies to increase vegetable intake grounded in behavioral economics are no/low cost and may be easily implemented in the home by parents. METHODS: This non-randomized, controlled study tested whether an intervention of parent-led strategies informed by behavioral economics and implemented within a series of 6 weekly parent-child vegetable cooking skills classes, improved dietary outcomes of a diverse sample of low-income children (ages 9-12) more than the vegetable cooking skills classes alone. The primary outcomes were total vegetable intake, dietary quality (HEI scores), total energy intake, vegetable liking, variety of vegetables tried, child BMI-z score, and home availability of vegetables. Outcome measures were collected at baseline, immediate post-treatment, 6 and 12 months follow-up. Mixed model regression analyses with fixed independent effects (treatment condition, time point and treatment condition x time interaction) were used to compare outcomes between treatment conditions. RESULTS: A total of 103 parent/child pairs (intervention = 49, control = 54) were enrolled and 91 (intervention = 44, control = 47) completed the weekly cooking skills program. The intervention did not improve child total vegetable intake. Intervention children increased dark green vegetable intake from immediate post-treatment to 12 months. The number of vegetables children tried increased and mean vegetable liking decreased over time for both control and intervention children. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this study suggest that the strategies and the manner in which they were implemented may not be effective in low-income populations. The burden of implementing a number of strategies with potentially higher food costs may have constrained the ability of families in the current study to use the strategies as intended. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This trial has been retrospectively registered at : # NCT03641521 on August 21, 2018.

Examining the feasibility of implementing behavioural economics strategies that encourage home dinner vegetable intake among low-income children.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the feasibility of implementing nine behavioural economics-informed strategies, or 'nudges', that aimed to encourage home dinner vegetable intake among low-income children. DESIGN: Caregivers were assigned six of nine strategies and implemented one new strategy per week (i.e. 6 weeks) during three dinner meals. Caregivers recorded child dinner vegetable intake on the nights of strategy implementation and rated the level of difficulty for assigned strategies. Baseline data on home vegetable availability and child vegetable liking were collected to assess overall strategy feasibility. SETTING: Participants' homes in a large Midwestern metropolitan area, USA. SUBJECTS: Low-income caregiver/child (aged 9-12 years) dyads (n 39). RESULTS: Pairwise comparisons showed that child dinner vegetable intake for the strategy 'Serve at least two vegetables with dinner meals' was greater than intake for each of two other strategies: 'Pair vegetables with other foods the child likes' and 'Eat dinner together with an adult(s) modelling vegetable consumption'. Overall, caregivers' mean rating of difficulty for implementing strategies was 2·6 (1='not difficult', 10='very difficult'). Households had a mean of ten different types of vegetables available. Children reported a rating ≥5 for seventeen types of vegetable on a labelled hedonic scale (1='hate it', 5-6='it's okay', 10='like it a lot'). CONCLUSIONS: Behavioural economics-informed strategies are feasible to implement during dinner meals, with some strategies differing by how much they influence vegetable intake among low-income children in the home.

Behavioral compensation before and after eating at the Minnesota State Fair.

People regulate their eating behavior in many ways. They may respond to overeating by compensating with healthy eating behavior or increased exercise (i.e., a sensible tradeoff), or by continuing to eat poorly (i.e., disinhibition). Conversely, people may respond to a healthy eating event by subsequently eating poorly (i.e., self-licensing) or by continuing to eat healthily (i.e., promotion spillover). We propose that people may also change their behaviors in anticipation of an unhealthy eating event, a phenomenon that we will refer to as pre-compensation. Using a survey of 430 attendees of the Minnesota State Fair over two years, we explored whether, when, and how people compensated before and after this tempting eating event. We found evidence that people use both pre-compensatory and post-compensatory strategies, with a preference for changing their eating (rather than exercise) behavior. There was no evidence that people who pre-compensated were more likely to self-license by indulging in a greater number of foods or calories at the fair than those who did not. Finally, people who pre-compensated were more likely to also post-compensate. These results suggest that changing eating or exercise behavior before exposure to a situation with many tempting foods may be a successful strategy for enjoying oneself without excessively overeating.

Prediction of daily food intake as a function of measurement modality and restriction status.

OBJECTIVE: Research on eating relies on various indices (e.g., stable, momentary, neural) to accurately reflect food-related reactivity (e.g., disinhibition) and regulation (e.g., restraint) outside the laboratory. The degree to which they differentially predict real-world consumption remains unclear. Further, the predictive validity of these indices might vary depending on whether an individual is actively restricting intake. METHODS: We assessed food craving reactivity and regulation in 46 healthy participants (30 women, 18-30 years) using standard measurements in three modalities: a) self-reported (stable) traits using surveys popular in the eating literature, and b) momentary craving ratings and c) neural activation using aggregated functional magnetic resonance imaging data gathered during a food reactivity-and-regulation task. We then used these data to predict variance in real-world consumption of craved energy-dense "target" foods across 2 weeks among normal-weight participants randomly assigned to restrict or monitor target food intake. RESULTS: The predictive validity of four indices varied significantly by restriction. When participants were not restricting intake, momentary (B = 0.21, standard error [SE] = 0.05) and neural (B = 0.08, SE = 0.04) reactivity positively predicted consumption, and stable (B = -0.22, SE = 0.05) and momentary (B = -0.24, SE = 0.05) regulation negatively predicted consumption. When restricting, stable (B = 0.36, SE = 0.12) and neural (B = 0.51, SE = 0.12) regulation positively predicted consumption. CONCLUSIONS: Commonly-used indices of regulation and reactivity differentially relate to an ecologically-valid eating measurement, depending on the presence of restriction goals, and thus have strong implications for predicting real-world behaviors.

Increasing portion sizes of fruits and vegetables in an elementary school lunch program can increase fruit and vegetable consumption.

Increasing portion size can increase children's consumption of food. The goal of this study was to determine whether increasing the portion sizes of fruits and vegetables in an elementary school cafeteria environment would increase children's consumption of them. We measured each child's consumption of the fruit and vegetables served in a cafeteria line on a control day (normal cafeteria procedures) and on two intervention days. When we increased the portion size of 3 of the 4 fruits and vegetables by about 50%, children who took those foods increased their consumption of them. Although this was an effective strategy for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption among students who took those foods, many children chose not to take any fruits or vegetables. Further efforts are needed to increase children's selection and consumption of fruits and vegetables in an environment of competing foods of higher palatability.

Neural systems underlying the reappraisal of personally craved foods.

Craving of unhealthy food is a common target of self-regulation, but the neural systems underlying this process are understudied. In this study, participants used cognitive reappraisal to regulate their desire to consume idiosyncratically craved or not craved energy-dense foods, and neural activity during regulation was compared with each other and with the activity during passive viewing of energy-dense foods. Regulation of both food types elicited activation in classic top-down self-regulation regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal, inferior frontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices. This main effect of regulation was qualified by an interaction, such that activation in these regions was significantly greater during reappraisal of craved (versus not craved) foods and several regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal, inferior frontal, medial frontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices, were uniquely active during regulation of personally craved foods. Body mass index significantly negatively correlated with regulation-related activation in the right dorsolateral PFC, thalamus, and bilateral dorsal ACC and with activity in nucleus accumbens during passive viewing of craved (vs. neutral, low-energy density) foods. These results suggest that several of the brain regions involved in the self-regulation of food craving are similar to other kinds of affective self-regulation and that others are sensitive to the self-relevance of the regulation target.

Reducing smoking among distracted individuals: a preliminary investigation.

INTRODUCTION: According to the attentional myopia model, salient cues that serve to inhibit behavior can be especially effective under conditions of limited attention. A small field study tested the implications of this model for smoking reduction. METHODS: Twenty-three undergraduate smokers were exposed to a prominent health warning for 2 5-day experimental phases, with phase order counterbalanced across participants. During one phase, participants simply viewed the warning at regular intervals. During the other phase, participants viewed the warning for the same duration but also simultaneously performed a distracting cognitive load task. RESULTS: Participants in the phase that combined a health warning with cognitive load reported smoking significantly fewer cigarettes and taking significantly fewer puffs of smoke as compared to a baseline comparison phase-a reduction in smoking not observed in the absence of cognitive load. CONCLUSIONS: Sources of attentional distraction may heighten the impact of salient smoking warnings, resulting in significant reductions in smoking.

Ask a Busy Person: Attentional Myopia and Helping.

According to an oft-quoted piece of folk wisdom, if one wants something accomplished, the best person to ask is a busy person. We tested a version of this proposition in two studies. Study 1 exposed participants to a helping request in which cues promoting the relevant behavior were made more salient than those inhibiting it. Study 2 featured a request in which inhibiting cues were made more salient than cues promoting the behavior. In both studies, participants who were "busied" by high cognitive load showed more influence of the dominant behavioral pressure than did participants under minimal load. The results suggest that busy people can respond more to a helping appeal, but only when cues facilitating helping are more salient than those discouraging it.

The role of social norms, intergroup contact, and ingroup favoritism in weight stigma.

Although average body size in the U.S. has increased in recent decades, stigma directed at individuals with higher weight has not diminished. In this study, we explored this phenomenon by investigating the relationship between people's perceived social norms regarding higher weight and their reported levels of weight bias (i.e., anti-fat attitudes). Our predictions for perceived social norms drew on the concepts of intergroup contact and ingroup favoritism, which were also probed in this study. We hypothesized that both greater descriptive norms and more favorable injunctive norms regarding higher weight would be associated with lower reported weight bias. Individuals' quantity and quality of social contact with people with higher weight were also predicted to be associated with lower weight bias. Finally, we predicted that individuals who perceived themselves as heavier would display ingroup favoritism (i.e., report less weight bias). Participants (N = 272) from the United States completed a set of online questionnaires about their perceived social norms, social contact with people with higher weight, and explicit weight bias. We found support for each of these pre-registered predictions (ps < 0.03), and post hoc analyses revealed that quality, but not quantity, of social contact with individuals with higher weight was an important predictor of lower weight bias. Together, these findings provide insight into the social psychology of weight bias and help to lay a theoretical foundation for future efforts to reduce weight stigma.

Consequences of receiving weight-related advice from a healthcare provider: Understanding the varied experiences of people with higher weight.

Healthcare providers regularly give weight-related advice (e.g., behavioral weight loss counseling) to patients with higher weight (BMI ≥30 kg/m2). The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends this practice on the basis that behavioral weight-related advice can motivate patients to attempt weight loss; however, it is also possible that this advice has adverse consequences (e.g., negative psychological reactions). In this study, we examined people's reported reactions to a recent experience of receiving weight-related advice from a healthcare provider. U.S. adults (N = 189) with higher weight who reported having received weight-related advice completed an online survey via Prolific. They answered questions about their most recent experience of receiving weight-related advice, including the purpose of the visit, characteristics of their provider, and characteristics of the advice itself. They also provided demographic information and indicated their trust in healthcare providers and the healthcare system. 90.5% of participants (n = 171) reported having one of three types of reactions to their provider's weight-related advice. Participants (1) felt motivated to change their behaviors and weight; (2) felt bad or guilty about their behaviors and weight; or (3) felt both motivated to change and bad or guilty. Using chi-square tests of independence and one-way ANOVAs, we examined how various participant characteristics and characteristics of the visit, provider, and advice itself differed across these three groups. We found significant demographic differences across the groups and found that a disproportionate amount of people in the "motivated" group reported having requested the weight-related advice and having had a two-way discussion about weight with their provider. Whereas some people feel motivated after receiving weight-related advice from a healthcare provider, others are left feeling bad about themselves or ambivalent. Understanding these varied reactions may provide insights into how healthcare providers can deliver advice that is motivating without eliciting negative psychological reactions.

Taming the white bear: Lowering reactance pressures enhances thought suppression.

Individuals fail to suppress certain thoughts, especially under conditions that tax cognitive resources. We investigated the impact of modifying psychological reactance pressures on thought suppression attempts. Participants were asked to suppress thoughts of a target item under standard experimental conditions or under conditions designed to lower reactance pressures. In the presence of high cognitive load, weakening associated reactance pressures resulted in greater success at suppression. The results suggest that reducing relevant motivational pressures can facilitate thought suppression, even when an individual experiences cognitive limitation.

Friends don't let friends eat cookies: effects of restrictive eating norms on consumption among friends.

Social norms are thought to be a strong influence over eating, but this hypothesis has only been experimentally tested with groups of strangers, and correlational studies using actual friends lack important controls. We manipulate an eating norm in the laboratory and explore its influence within established friendships. In two studies we randomly assigned groups of three friends to a restrictive norm condition, in which two of the friends were secretly instructed to restrict their intake of appetizing foods, or a control condition, in which the friends were not instructed to restrict their eating. The third friend's consumption was measured while eating with the other two friends and while eating alone. In both studies, participants consumed less food when eating with friends who had been given restricting instructions compared to those who had not been given those instructions. In Study 2, participants who ate with restricting friends also continued to restrict their eating when alone. Experimentally manipulating social norms within established friendships is possible, and these norms can influence consumption in those social groups and carry over into non-social eating situations. These findings may suggest mechanisms through which eating behaviors may spread through social networks, as well as an environmental factor that may be amenable to change.

Control Yourself: Broad Implications of Narrowed Attention.

Attention represents a key element of self-control, and multiple theoretical accounts have highlighted the role played by abundant attentional capacity in effecting successful self-regulation. What, then, are the consequences of living in today's world, in which attention can become so easily divided by a multitude of stimuli? In this article, we consider the implications of divided attention for self-control and show that although the end result is typically disinhibited behavior, under specified conditions, attentional limitation, or what we term attentional myopia, can be associated with enhanced restraint.

Norms and attributions about weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective. Weight gain was common during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially creating a new descriptive norm about weight gain. The unique context of a global pandemic may have influenced situational attributions for weight gain that were not typical prior to the pandemic. We examined the effects of the new norm on people's views about responsibility and blame for weight gain.Methods. In two preregistered surveys, we aimed to manipulate the salience of weight gain during COVID-19, and measured views about responsibility and blame for weight gain.Results. Among participants who gained weight, the more common they perceived weight gain to be, the more they felt their own weight gain was understandable (b = 0.09, se = 0.04, p = 0.02), but perceived commonness didn't relate to their feelings of responsibility and blame for weight gain. For participants who didn't gain weight, the perceived commonness of weight gain was associated with less blame towards people who gained weight (b = 0.11, se= 1.46, p = 0.044), but not with responsibility for weight gain.Conclusion. Participants believed weight gain was common during COVID, but this descriptive norm had mixed associations with attributions for one's own and others' weight gain.

Calorie deprivation impairs the self-control of eating, but not of other behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: Sustained weight loss is difficult to achieve, and weight regain is common due to biological and psychological changes caused by calorie deprivation. These changes are thought to undermine weight loss efforts by making self-control more difficult. However, there is a lack of evidence showing a causal relationship between calorie deprivation and behavioral self-control. DESIGN: In this longitudinal field experiment, we tested whether a ten-day period of calorie deprivation leads to the impairment of behavioral self-control. Participants were randomly assigned to either restrict their calorie intake or to continue eating normally for the study period. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants were given a box of food and non-food 'treats' (i.e., chocolates and lottery tickets) that they were asked to resist until the end of the study. On the last day, researchers recorded the number of treats that remained for each participant. RESULTS: Nonparametric permutation tests revealed that calorie-deprived participants ate significantly more chocolates than control participants did (p = 0.036), but that participants did not differ in the number of lottery tickets 'scratched' by condition (p = 0.332). CONCLUSION: This pattern of findings suggests that calorie deprivation impairs food-related self-control, but that this self-control deficit may not generalize beyond food-related tasks.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

Predicting persuasion-induced behavior change from the brain.

Although persuasive messages often alter people's self-reported attitudes and intentions to perform behaviors, these self-reports do not necessarily predict behavior change. We demonstrate that neural responses to persuasive messages can predict variability in behavior change in the subsequent week. Specifically, an a priori region of interest (ROI) in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was reliably associated with behavior change (r = 0.49, p < 0.05). Additionally, an iterative cross-validation approach using activity in this MPFC ROI predicted an average 23% of the variance in behavior change beyond the variance predicted by self-reported attitudes and intentions. Thus, neural signals can predict behavioral changes that are not predicted from self-reported attitudes and intentions alone. Additionally, this is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study to demonstrate that a neural signal can predict complex real world behavior days in advance.