Implicit food associations as obstacles to healthy nutrition: the need for further research

Mai, Robert; Hoffmann, Stefan; Helmert, Jens R.; Velichkovsky, Boris M.; Zahn, Susann; Jaros, Doris; Schwarz, Peter E. H.; Rohm, Harald

doi:10.1177/1474651411410725

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Importantly, one is typically not aware of the processes governing one’s health behavior decisions (e.g., what to eat, whether to go to the gym; Devine, 1989; Marcus, Rossi, Selby, Niaura, & Abrams, 1992; Wadden et al, 2002; T. D. Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000; World Health Organization, 2010). Implicit processes are likely to favor hedonic pleasure, comfort, and sedentariness over long-term objectives (Friese, Hofmann, & Wänke, 2008; Mai et al, 2011). Thus, dietary and PA adherence demands self-regulation, which depends on the ability to maintain a continued awareness both of one's current behavior and of how that behavior compares with a relevant standard (Baumeister, 1998; Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1998; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960).…”

Section: Psychological Skills Necessary For Successful Weight Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new look at the science of weight control: How acceptance and commitment strategies can address the challenge of self-regulation

2015

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Despite decades of work, behavioral interventions for obesity are not yet able to facilitate long-term weight loss maintenance for most participants. The current manuscript proposes an acceptance-based, self-regulation framework for understanding the challenge of maintaining changes in weight-related behavior and describes how this framework can be integrated into the behavioral treatment of obesity. According to this framework, intrinsic drives to consume palatable, high-calorie food interact with a modern environment in which high calorie foods are easily accessible. This combination produces a chronic desire to eat unhealthy foods that exists in opposition to individuals’ weight control goals. Similarly, energy expenditure requirements in the modern environment are limited, and people’s innate preferences to conserve energy typically prevent the concerted effort that would be necessary to engage in lifestyle activity and structured activity. Both external (e.g., sight of food) and internal (e.g., an aversive emotion) cues motivate overeating and sedentary behavior. However, individuals vary in their responsivity to these cues. While standard behavior skills may enable those lower in responsivity to successfully achieve weight control, we suggest that those higher in responsivity need specialized self-regulatory skills to maintain healthy eating and exercise behaviors. These skills include an ability to tolerate uncomfortable internal reactions to triggers and a reduction of pleasure, behavioral commitment to clearly-defined values, and metacognitive awareness of decision-making processes. So-called “acceptance-based” interventions based on these skills have so far proven efficacious for weight control, especially for those who are the most susceptible to eating in response to internal and external cues (as predicted by the model). Despite the current empirical support for the postulated model and for the interventions which stem from it, much remains to be learned including whether acceptance-based interventions will prove efficacious in the longer-term.

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Section: Psychological Skills Necessary For Successful Weight Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new look at the science of weight control: How acceptance and commitment strategies can address the challenge of self-regulation

2015

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“…Accumulating evidence suggests that obese individuals tend to consume higher levels of fats, sugars, and proteins than their normal-weight counterparts (e.g., Mai et al, 2011;McGloin et al, 2002;Nicklas, Yang, Baranowski, Zakeri, & Berenson, 2003). Several authors have sought to explain this maladaptive pattern of behavior in terms of food-related evaluations.…”

Section: Irap Food Cognition 2 Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

Obesity, food restriction, and implicit attitudes to healthy and unhealthy foods: Lessons learned from the implicit relational assessment procedure

et al. 2016

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. Electronic mail should be sent to sean.hughes@ugent.be. IRAP Food Cognition 2 AbstractIt has been argued that obese individuals evaluate high caloric, palatable foods more positively than their normal weight peers, and that this positivity bias causes them to consume such foods, even when healthy alternatives are available. Yet when self-reported and automatic food preferences are assessed no such evaluative biases tend to emerge. We argue that situational (food deprivation) and methodological factors may explain why implicit measures often fail to discriminate between the food-evaluations of these two groups. Across three studies we manipulated the food deprivation state of clinically obese and normal-weight participants and then exposed them to an indirect procedure (IRAP) and self-report questionnaires. We found that automatic food-related cognition was moderated by a person's weight status and food deprivation state. Our findings suggest that the diagnostic and predictive value of implicit measures may be increased when (a) situational moderators are taken into consideration and (b)we pay greater attention to the different ways in which people automatically relate rather than simply categorize food stimuli. The Western world is currently facing an obesity epidemic. Over the past three decades, obesity rates have exploded at an alarming rate (Finucane et al., 2011), to the point that one in three adults in the United States (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2014) as well as one in five Europeans are currently overweight (WHO, 2013). As prevalence rates have grown so too have the health-related, socioeconomic, and psychological costs associated with this phenomenon (Finkelstein, Ruhm, & Kosal, 2005;Wardle & Cooke, 2005). With obesity comes an increased risk of type-II diabetes, adult heart disease, as well as several forms of cancer and premature morbidity (Reilly, et al., 2003;Wang, McPherson, Marsh, Gortmaker, & Brown, 2011). In addition to its economic burden, obesity is also associated with a host of psychosocial problems, including anxiety, depression, and social discrimination (see Puhl & Heuer, 2009; Sutin, Stephan, & Terracciano, 2015;Wang et al., 2011). If we are to design effective interventions to ameliorate or even reverse this epidemic then research will need to elucidate those factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of this phenomenon.One such factor appears to be food choice, and in particular, the excessive consumption of energy dense foods containing high levels of calories, sugars, and fat as well as the under consumption of nutrient dense foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Accumulating evidence suggests that obese individuals tend to consume higher levels of fats, sugars, and proteins than their normal-weight counterparts (e.g., Mai et al., 2011;McGloin et al., 2002;Nicklas, Yang, Baranowski, Zakeri, & Berenson, 2003). Several authors have sought to explain this maladaptive pattern of behavior in terms of food-related evaluations. That is, obese individuals are t...

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“…27. For evidence of this well-supported finding in cognitive science, see Gawronski and Payne (2010), Mai et al (2011), andPerkins andForehand (2012). 28.…”

Section: P2mentioning

confidence: 94%

Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene’s notion of unfamiliarity

Dale

2020

Philosophical Psychology

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In his article "Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality," Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual conscious reasoning system more than our automatic emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene's argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is, and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling and, thus, should be abandoned.

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Implicit food associations as obstacles to healthy nutrition: the need for further research

Cited by 14 publications

References 27 publications

A new look at the science of weight control: How acceptance and commitment strategies can address the challenge of self-regulation

A new look at the science of weight control: How acceptance and commitment strategies can address the challenge of self-regulation

Obesity, food restriction, and implicit attitudes to healthy and unhealthy foods: Lessons learned from the implicit relational assessment procedure

Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene’s notion of unfamiliarity

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