Self-regulation
Do food pictures make it harder to stop yourself from responding?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Food pictures made people respond faster and more automatically regardless of hunger, but how that related to dieting success depended on whether they had just eaten.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Pictorial affective shifting (go/no-go) task with food vs neutral targets and distractors; Study 2 added a between-groups manipulation where half ate a snack before testing (satiated) and half stayed hungry.
- N
- N=102 · 102 women in Study 2 (51 satiated, 51 hungry). The Study 1 participant description is missing from the available text, so its sample size is not stated here.
- Population
- Young female university students in Germany, mostly of normal weight.
- Outcome
- Reaction times, commission errors (responding to distractors) and omission errors (missing targets) for food vs neutral stimuli, and their correlations with BMI, self-reported dieting success, impulsivity and food craving.
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Key findings
In both studies, participants responded faster to food targets and missed fewer of them than neutral targets. In Study 2, which produced more errors, participants also wrongly responded to food distractors more often than to neutral distractors, and eating beforehand did not change these food-versus-neutral differences. Hunger did change individual-difference links: when hungry, women with higher dieting success responded faster and made fewer errors in food blocks, but this advantage disappeared when satiated, and after eating, lower dieting success predicted bigger rises in craving.
Methodology
Young women did a go/no-go task in which they pressed a key for pictures of one category (for example, food) and withheld responses to the other (neutral objects), with the rule reversing every other block. Study 1 tested hungry participants; Study 2 used more trials and visually matched pictures, and had half of the participants eat a sweet yoghurt-like snack beforehand while the other half stayed hungry. Participants also reported BMI-related, dieting success, impulsivity and food craving measures.
Limitations
The samples were healthy young women of mostly normal weight, so the results may not apply to men, people with obesity or people with eating disorders. There was no second attractive non-food category, so faster responses to food may partly reflect food being a smaller, easier-to-recognise category rather than its reward value. Study 1 had very few errors overall, and many correlations were tested, so some individual-difference findings may not replicate; the correlational links with dieting success cannot show cause and effect.
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