Memory bias for forbidden food cues in restrained eaters

Abstract

Research on the cognitive patterns characteristic of women high in dietary restraint indicates an attentional bias favoring the early-stage selective processing of forbidden food words. The current study was conducted to determine whether highly restrained women also show a later stage memory bias for forbidden food words. Sixty-seven university females encoded a list of 30 words (15 forbidden food words, 15 animal control words) presented in an incidental learning task. Participants were then asked to freely recall as many words as they could remember. Scores on the Restraint Scale were used to classify participants as either high (N = 29) or low (N = 38) in dietary restraint. Contrary to prediction, high-restraint women did not remember more forbidden food words than low-restraint women. High-restraint women did, however, remember fewer animal control words than low-restraint women, suggesting a deficit in memory for material outside of the food-schema domain in restrained eaters relative to nonrestrained eaters. Consistent with hypothesis, only women in the high-restraint group remembered more forbidden food than animal control words, indicating a relative memory bias for forbidden food words only among restrained eaters. The results thus provide only partial support for Bemis-Vitousek and Hollon's theory that restrained eaters have cognitive structures (schema) which may support more elaborative encoding and/or greater memory accessibility of personally relevant (i.e., forbidden food) information and which may underlie self-reported food preoccupation among clinical and nonclinical restrained eaters.