How Can Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Both Be Changed? Testing Two Interventions to Promote Consumption of Green Vegetables

Abstract

This study is the first to demonstrate that a self-referencing task is effective in changing both implicit attitudes and readiness to change eating behavior. Findings indicate that distinct intervention strategies are needed to change implicit and explicit attitudes towards green vegetables.

Neurophysiological Effects Associated With Subliminal Conditioning of Appetite Motivations

“…Taken together, our results suggest that urges to engage in pathological eating practices may be mitigated through preventing the conscious perception of eating-associated stimuli/cues (Custers and Aarts, 2010). Future research could extend these findings to subjects prone to “emotional eating” (Hensels and Baines, 2016) to determine whether subliminally augmenting the valences of eating representations motivates actual eating, and whether such motivations may be transitory or cumulative (e.g., Mattavelli et al, 2017). If the latter, the logical next step would be to adapt the proposed procedure for use with anorexic individuals, whose maladaptive belief systems regarding eating constitutes a core element of their pathology (Merwin et al, 2010).…”

All I Need Is Two: The Clinical Potential of Adding Evaluative Pairing Procedures to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Changing Self-, Body- and Food-Related Evaluations

“…Another set of studies by Walsh and Kiviniemi [90] and Hensels and Baines [91] provide converging evidence for the positive effects of pairing procedures on food preferences and choice behavior (see also Ebert et al [92] and Mattavelli et al [93]). Differing from previous investigations, both studies presented healthy foods as targets with positive or neutral food-unrelated stimuli as sources (for a similar study in preschool children, see Halbeisen and Walther [47]).…”

“…For example, the procedure of Dijksterhuis [65] lasted a total of 30 trials, whereas Martijn et al [16] had 270 trials and Dwyer et al [87] had 24 trials. Moreover, some studies used rather intense affective pictures as evaluative sources [95], whereas others relied on the associated evaluations of self-referential pronouns [93]. Although consistent effects between the magnitude of pairing effects and the frequency of pairings or the intensity of evaluative sources were not obtained in previous meta-analyses [41], individual studies suggest the possibility of inverted u-shape relations between effect magnitude and both pairing frequency and source intensity [62,111].…”

The influence of extinction and counterconditioning procedures on operant evaluative conditioning and intersecting regularity effects

“…So far, research on IR has mostly focused on establishing or changing evaluations and intentions towards novel stimuli (experiments 1-7) or pre-existing stimuli. For instance, Mattavelli et al [42] used the selfreferencing task, an IR-based paradigm in which stimuli are related with the (generally positive) concept of self, to countercondition green vegetables in a population of participants who did not like green vegetables. This intervention led to more positive implicit attitudes towards green vegetables and to an increased intention to consume them in future.…”