The future is now: Comparing the effect of episodic future thinking on impulsivity in lean and obese individuals

Abstract

The choice of small immediate rewards as opposed to larger delayed rewards, or delay discounting, is an important dimension of impulsive decision making. The inability to delay gratification is related to obesity, as well as other maladaptive behaviors such as substance abuse, problem drinking, smoking, pathological gambling, and risky HIV behaviors. One way to reduce delay discounting (DD) may be to use prospective imagery in the form of episodic future thinking (EFT) during inter-temporal decision making. We have recently shown that EFT reduces DD and ad libitum energy intake in obese individuals. However, no studies have examined whether the magnitude of the EFT effect differs between lean and overweight/obese individuals. We conducted a within-subject design experiment to compare the efficacy of EFT versus a control task in reducing DD between lean (N = 24) and overweight/obese (N = 24) women. Participants attended two sessions in which they engaged in either EFT or control episodic thinking during a DD task. We also examined whether individual differences such as trait time perspective, behavioral inhibition or behavioral activation moderated the EFT effect on DD. Results showed EFT reduced DD similarly for lean and overweight/obese individuals. The EFT effect was moderated by behavioral activation. This suggests EFT is just as effective in reducing impulsive decision making in obese individuals as it is in lean individuals and may be useful in reducing other impulsive obesity related behaviors.

No food for thought: moderating effects of delay discounting and future time perspective on the relation between income and food insecurity , , ,

“…Training in impulse control may provide wide-ranging benefits for low-income persons to reduce food insecurity as well as enhance their financial portfolio. In addition, a focus on immediate challenges can be shifted to long-range goals by training in episodic future thinking, which teaches people to consider the future as they are making decisions about a small, current reward compared with a larger, delayed reward (27,28). Predicting food insecurity (top graphs) and the proportion of very high food insecurity [$5 on a 6-item food-security questionnaire (bottom graphs)] by interactions of income 3 financial planning 3 delay discounting (impulsivity).…”

Short horizons and obesity futures: Disjunctures between public health interventions and everyday temporalities

“…The future discounting literature does not attend to 'the future' as an analytical category, inevitably raising questions that feed into common stereotypes about fat people's lack of control and self-will, and blaming them for their 'poor choices'. Similarly, promising work on designing interventions in obesity and 'delay discounting' (Daniel et al, 2013), does not attend to socio-economic dimensions of everyday lives, thus stripping behaviours to individual bodies, devoid of important social contexts.…”

Adolescent impatience decreases with increased frontostriatal connectivity

“…Seed-based classification was done by first thresholding the images such that only voxels with at least 10 samples were kept (21,45,92). Following standard procedures, voxel values were converted into proportions, such that the value at each voxel becomes the number of tracts reaching the target mask for that voxel, divided by the number of tracts that reach any of the 10 a priori target masks based on single or a combination of the standard automated anatomical labeling (AAL) maps [AAL map numbers within parentheses (21,45)]: mOFC (28,6,26), vlPFC (10,16), IFG (triangular partIFG: 14), dlPFC (4,8), PCC (68), ACC (32), dACC (34), hippocampus (38), amygdala (42), and SMA (20). The striatum mask was based on the combined striatal volumes produced by the freesurfer subcortical segmentation algorithm.…”

“…On the other hand, more patient behavior may result from control processes that bias attention away from immediate rewards and/or emphasize the importance of future goals (24,25). There are several studies that show that individual differences in future orientation are associated with more patient choices (1,21,26). Explicitly instructed future orientation leads to (i) withinsubject reduction in discount rates (27)(28)(29) and (ii) increased activity in the brain's executive control network (30).…”