Food approach dynamics in daily life: Speed and force of food approach movements fluctuate with hunger, but less so for people with high BMI

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that overconsumption of food, alcohol, and drugs could be explained by chronically elevated approach tendencies to rewarding but unhealthy stimuli. Here, we use the example of food to show that dysregulated rather than chronically elevated approach tendencies are associated with negative health outcomes. To this end, we developed a new smartphone-based paradigm to measure dynamic changes in food approach tendencies outside the laboratory (piloted with N = 48). We demonstrated in three pre-registered experiments (total N = 367) that food approach tendencies decrease from before to after people have eaten. We further show that in overweight and obese participants, these dynamics are disrupted, as their food approach tendencies increase rather than decrease after meals. In addition to showing these effects based on traditional reaction time-based food approach tendencies, we also demonstrate these patterns in a novel measure of response force—a measure that has long been used to study motivation in animals but has received little attention in humans. Together, our findings suggest that both reaction-time based, and force-based approach tendencies change dynamically in accordance with people’s need states and that disruptions in these dynamics are associated with negative health outcomes, such as overweight and obesity.

Testing the effectiveness of a mobile approach avoidance intervention and measuring approach biases in an ecological momentary assessment context: study protocol for a randomised-controlled trial

“…28 Such within-subject fluctuations in biases are probably not only due to random variation, as approachavoidance biases have been shown to decrease with aftermeal-satiety in normal-weight individuals, and they have been shown to change based on individuals' current affective states. [29][30][31][32][33] In combination, these results raise questions about the temporal and situational stability of approach biases.…”