Mindfulness reduces reactivity to food cues: underlying mechanisms and applications in daily life

Purpose of Review: Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming increasingly popular as a means to facilitate healthy eating. We suggest that the decentering component of mindfulness, which is the metacognitive insight that all experiences are impermanent, plays an especially important role in such interventions. To facilitate the application of decentering, we address its psychological mechanism to reduce reactivity to food cues, proposing that it makes thoughts and simulations in response to food cues less compelling. We discuss supporting evidence, applications, and challenges for future research. Recent Findings: Experimental and correlational studies consistently find that the adoption of a decentering perspective reduces subjective cravings, physiological reactivity such as salivation, and unhealthy eating. Summary: We suggest that the decentering perspective can be adopted in any situation to reduce reactivity to food cues. Considering people’s high exposure to food temptations in daily life, this makes it a powerful tool to empower people to eat healthily

Putting behavior on hold decreases reward value of need-instrumental objects outside of awareness

We examined whether cues that put impulsive behavior towards rewarding objects on hold reduces the value of the rewarding objects outside of conscious awareness. We manipulated the reward value of water by making participants thirsty, or not. Next, a bottle of water was subliminally presented in a go/no-go task, and paired with either go cues or no-go cues (putting behavior on hold). Subsequently, as a measure of reward value of water, participants estimated the size of water objects. Results showed that repeatedly withholding behavior towards water reduced the perceived size of water objects, but only when participants were made thirsty. These results suggest that withholding impulsive behavior towards objects that serve basic needs nonconsciously reduces reward value of these objects. Implications for nonconscious behavior regulation are briefly discussed

On the emergence of deprivation-reducing behaviors: Subliminal priming of behavior representations turns deprivation into motivation

Building on recent research into the emergence of human motivation and goal pursuit in the absence of the conscious awareness of the source of this pursuit, the present article aimed to shed light on how states of deprivation (e.g., deprivation of fluid) actually produce the motivation and corresponding behavior that lifts the deprivation. Two studies established that when participants were relatively deprived of fluids, they experienced enhanced motivation to drink and consumed more fluid in an alleged tasting test, and these effects were more pronounced when the concept of drinking was rendered accessible by subliminal priming. These results suggest that specific motivational goal states and corresponding behaviors do not arise directly from deprivation per se, but that accessible goal-related cognitions play a role in this process. Implications for theory and research on deprivation and non-conscious goal pursuit are briefly discussed

The goal dependent automaticity of drinking habits

In recent treatments of habitual social behaviour, habits are conceptualised as a form of goal-directed automatic behaviour that are mentally represented as goal-action links. Three experiments tested this conceptualisation in the context of students’ drinking (alcohol consumption) habits. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions where either a goal related to drinking behaviour (socialising) was activated, or an unrelated goal was activated. In addition, participants’ drinking habits were measured. The dependent variable in Experiments 1 and 2 was readiness to drink, operationalised by speed of responding to the action concept “drinking” in a verb verification task. Experiment 3 used uptake of a voucher to measure drinking behaviour. Findings supported the view that when habits are established, simply activating a goal related to the focal behaviour automatically elicits that behaviour. These findings are consistent with a goal-dependent conception of habit. Possibilities for interventions designed to attenuate undesirable habitual behaviours are considered

Всеукраїнська наукова конференція «Х Костомарівські читання»

14-15 квітня 2011 р. Чернігівщина вже вкотре приймала учасників всеукраїнської наукової конференції «Костомарівські читання». Зусиллями її незмінних організаторів Юрія Пінчука, Сергія Лаєвського та Сергія Леп’явка, конференція стала доброю науковою традицією, а цього року ще й відсвяткувала свій перший ювілей, адже відбувалася вдесяте. Х Костомарівські читання були присвячені 390-й річниці перемоги у Хотинській битві, однак їхня тематика не обмежувалася власне війною та добою гетьмана П. Сагайдачного. Основною метою читань організатори вбачають: спілкування вчених-істориків «без краваток» для ознайомлення колег з новітніми дослідженнями, знахідками та ідеями в ділянці історії України доби козаччини; залучення чернігівських істориків до спілкування з провідними вченими з наукових центрів; ознайомлення дослідників з Черніговом та його історичною спадщиною

Why dieters fail: testing the goal conflict model of eating

A new theory of eating regulation is presented to account for the over-responsiveness of restrained eaters to external food-relevant cues. According to this theory, the food intake of restrained eaters is characterized by a conflict between two chronically accessible incentives or goals: eating enjoyment and weight control. Their difficulty in weight control is due to their behavioral sensitivity to eating enjoyment and its incompatibility with the eating control goal. Accordingly, exposure to food-relevant stimuli primes the goal of eating enjoyment in restrained (but not unrestrained) eaters, resulting in an inhibition of weight control thoughts. Three studies are reported that support these assumptions. Study 1 demonstrates a substantial relation between Eating Restraint and measures of ambivalence towards eating. Studies 2 and 3 show that priming eating enjoyment decreases the accessibility of eating control concepts. The results are discussed in the context of current research on the psychology of obesity and restrained eating

The allure of forbidden food: on the role of attention in self-regulation

The aim of the present studies was to examine the impact of food cues on restrained eaters' attention for food. Previous research has shown that restrained eaters spontaneously activate hedonic thoughts in response to palatable food cues, and that such food cues also lead them to inhibit their dieting goal. We argue that as a consequence, restrained eaters' selective attention will automatically be drawn towards hedonically relevant food items. Consistent with our expectations, the results of two studies revealed that restrained eaters, but not unrestrained eaters, displayed an attentional bias for hedonically rated food items when they had been pre-exposed to food cues. However, this attentional bias did not occur when restrained eaters were primed with the concept of dieting, thereby rendering the regulation of eating behavior more successful. These findings are discussed in the context of implicit processes in self-regulation

Perceiving emotions in visual stimuli: social verbal context facilitates emotion detection of words but not of faces

Building on the notion that processing of emotional stimuli is sensitive to context, in two experimental tasks we explored whether the detection of emotion in emotional words (task 1) and facial expressions (task 2) is facilitated by social verbal context. Three different levels of contextual supporting information were compared, namely (1) no information, (2) the verbal expression of an emotionally matched word pronounced with a neutral intonation, and (3) the verbal expression of an emotionally matched word pronounced with emotionally matched intonation. We found that increasing levels of supporting contextual information enhanced emotion detection for words, but not for facial expressions. We also measured activity of the corrugator and zygomaticus muscle to assess facial simulation, as processing of emotional stimuli can be facilitated by facial simulation. While facial simulation emerged for facial expressions, the level of contextual supporting information did not qualify this effect. All in all, our findings suggest that adding emotional-relevant voice elements positively influence emotion detection.· · · ·info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio