Healthy eating in the wild: An experience-sampling study of how food environments and situational factors shape out-of-home dietary success.

Across many parts of the world, people increasingly eat out-of-home. Simultaneously, many people strive to eat a healthier diet, but it remains unclear to what extent and how eating out helps or hinders people in achieving their dietary goals. The present study investigated how characteristics of the physical micro-environment in out-of-home food outlets (e.g., cafeterias, supermarkets, and restaurants) influence the healthiness of food choices among a sample of German adults with a goal to eat healthier. We used an experience sampling method to obtain detailed information about people's motivation for selecting a specific food outlet and the outlet's micro-environment. We further asked for people's mood, visceral state, and thoughts during their food choice and obtained evaluations of food choices reported near their occurrence and in externally valid conditions. The data was collected via a mobile app over a period of six to eleven days between November and December of 2018 in Germany with a sample of 409 participants (nobs = 6447). We find that even health-conscious people select food outlets and their respective micro-environments based on short-term goals, such as ease, taste, and speed of a consumption episode rather than long-term health outcomes. Using multiple regression, we show that micro-environments that promote healthy food, make such food more appealing and easier to select facilitate healthy food choices. We further identify some of the psychological mechanisms through which the micro-environment can affect food choices, as well as how individual characteristics moderate the relationship between specific micro-environmental factors and goal success. Taken together, our findings suggest the opportunity for, and arguably also necessity of, reshaping food environments to better facilitate healthier choices and support public health in the face of increasing out-of-home food consumption and the adverse consequences of unhealthy diets.

How psychology can help limit climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has encouraged psychologists to become part of the integrated scientific effort to support the achievement of climate change targets such as keeping within 1.5°C or 2°C of global warming. To date, the typical psychological approach has been to demonstrate that specific concepts and theories can predict behaviors that contribute to or mitigate climate change. Psychologists need to go further and, in particular, show that integrating psychological concepts into feasible interventions can reduce greenhouse gas emissions far more than would be achieved without such integration. While critiquing some aspects of current approaches, we describe psychological research that is pointing the way by distinguishing different types of behavior, acknowledging sociocultural context, and collaborating with other disciplines. Engaging this challenge offers psychologists new opportunities for promoting mitigation, advancing psychological understanding, and developing better interdisciplinary interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Unraveling the Relationship Between Trait Self-Control and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Four Self-Control Strategies.

Although several studies provide evidence that trait self-control contributes to subjective well-being, the self-control strategies that promotes happiness and life satisfaction remains unknown. The present study aims to shed light on this relation by investigating the mediating role of four self-control strategies: situation selection, attentional deployment, reappraisal, and inhibition. To test the hypothesis that self-control strategies mediate trait self-control's effect on well-being, an online questionnaire on trait self-control, self-control strategies, and cognitive and affective well-being was administered to 4,036 participants from four countries (ages 18-65 and 56.4% female), whose responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Our analysis replicates previous studies that trait self-control positively relates to subjective well-being. Moreover, our analysis provides evidence that this relation is indeed mediated by the tendency to employ particular self-control strategies. Attentional deployment and reappraisal positively relate to subjective well-being, whereas inhibition exhibits a negative relation. Situation selection was unrelated to subjective well-being. The incorporation of self-control strategies represents the first attempt to empirically disentangle the positive relation between trait self-control and subjective well-being. The heterogeneous effects of self-control strategies suggest the importance of obtaining a better understanding of which aspects of trait self-control positively contributes to subjective well-being.