Abstract
Dieting is a popular but difficult strategy for reducing weight. Previous studies have revealed several psychological characteristics associated with dieting failure. Here, the hypothesis that dieting failure is associated with unconscious hedonic responses to food was tested with a subliminal affective priming task. Food image primes or their scrambled mosaic primes were subliminally presented. Participants scored their liking of the subsequent target ideographs. The participants’ subjective dieting success was additionally assessed using questionnaires. Differences in liking scores of target ideographs between the food and mosaic conditions, as well as liking scores of target ideographs under the food condition by partialing-out other effects, were negatively associated with dieting success scores. These results suggest that dieting failure is associated with the strength of unconscious hedonic responses to food and that environmental controls to reduce food cues may be needed for dieting success.
Highlights
Dieting is a popular but difficult strategy for reducing weight
Partial correlation analyses showed that controlling for age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and hunger level did not change the significant correlation between the liking difference scores and perceived self-regulatory success in dieting scale (PSRS) scores, and none of these variables were significantly correlated with either liking difference or PSRS scores (|r| < 0.24, p > 0.10)
A polynomial regression analysis with PSRS scores as the dependent variable and liking scores of target ideographs under the food and mosaic conditions and their squared and product terms as the independent variables revealed that only the β value of liking scores of target ideographs under the food condition was significant [β = −1.15, t(23) = 2.03, p < 0.05; Figure 2, lower left]
Summary
Dieting is a popular but difficult strategy for reducing weight. Survey studies have shown that dieting is common during the entire lifespan in both females and males (Slof-Op’t Landt et al, 2017). In contrast to dieters’ expectation of weight reduction, empirical studies consistently revealed that dieting often fails and may lead to weight gain, which could induce health problems (for a review, see Lowe et al, 2013). Dieting was shown to be a risk factor for eating disorders (e.g., Stice et al, 2017; for a review, see Lowe and Timko, 2004). These data suggest that, to promote physical and mental health, further research is warranted to understand and improve dieting practices
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