Abstract
Many young women use dieting to achieve a thinner figure yet most tend to fail as a result of heightened responsiveness to palatable food environments and increases in hedonic cravings. In this preliminary study, we developed a novel palatable food vs. thin figure conflict task to assess conflicting motives associated with eating among young women. Forty young dieting women [mean body mass index (BMI) = 22.98 kg/m2, SD = 3.81] completed a food vs. figure conflict task within a 2 (distractor image: food vs. figure) × 2 (word-image congruence: congruent vs. incongruent) within-subjects design. Results supported the view that this new task could effectively capture conflict costs. Dieting young women displayed stronger food conflicts than figure conflicts based on having longer response delays and higher error rates in the food conflict condition than the figure conflict condition. Although young women often proclaimed “dieting” to achieve or maintain a good figure, dieters appeared to exhibit stronger preferences for palatable food cues relative to thin figure cues. These results provide important information for understanding automatic processing biases toward palatable foods and underscore the need for research extensions in other cultural contexts to determine whether such biases are universal in nature.
Highlights
In obesogenic environments, dieting has become so prevalent that it is a normative mode of eating, especially among young women (Andreyeva et al, 2010)
To test the premise that incongruent word-image trials would generate slow reaction times than would congruent wordimage trials, a 2 × 2 repeated measures ANCOVA analysis was performed on RT; hunger, fasting time, and body mass index (BMI) were covariates in the analysis
Longer RT and lower accuracy rates for incongruent wordimage trials than congruent trials confirmed that the paradigm developed in this study was suitable for measuring immediate responses to food vs. figure conflicts in line with conclusions of conceptually similar research (Damian and Bowers, 2003; Tillman and Wiens, 2011)
Summary
In obesogenic environments, dieting has become so prevalent that it is a normative mode of eating, especially among young women (Andreyeva et al, 2010). According to the goal conflict model of eating (Stroebe et al, 2013), dieters often fail because they are confronted with conflicting goals: appetitive enjoyment versus weight control. Young women who diet may experience a conflict between the appetitive enjoyment and having a thinner figure. Relative to “congruent” picture-word category presentations, “incongruent” picture-word presentations should be associated with longer reaction times (RT) and reduced accuracy rates that reflect conflict effects. This preliminary study was based on the premise that dieters have more frequent food cravings and stronger disinhibited eating than non-dieters do (Rideout and Barr, 2009; Massey and Hill, 2012). Young dieting women should display more conflict (i.e., slower RT, lower accuracy rates) when food images rather than figure images were used as distractors
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