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Eating Behaviour Notes on ALL Lectures Radboud
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These are elaborate notes on all of the lectures of Eating Behaviour, a psychology course on the Radboud University.
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Eating behaviourLecture 1 – 26/01/2021
Acquisition of likeability
Preferences vs. likes;
- Preference/acceptance; choice and how much do you eat.
- Liking; hedonic value of food, rating and facial expressions.
- In children, preference and liking is highly correlated.
Early likes
Really young babies already have preferences in food choice.
- They like sugar, umami and salty food; they don’t like bitter, really sour and irritating food.
- Flavor Bridge; when the mother already ate certain foods when she’s pregnant, that can
effect early preferences and acceptance of certain flavors.
Bayol et al.; children can accept a whole diet when their mother eats this diet ->
controversial because this was found in mice, don’t know about human babies yet.
Sensitive period theory of eating; young children (around 2) eat almost anything, but around 4-5
years they start to only eat what they like.
- Possible mechanisms to increase liking of food;
(Mere) exposure; does more exposure work on itself already? -> exposing young
children 7-10 times to food increases their liking and consumption.
Easier for foods that match innate preferences and this can last for months.
Accomplishing exposure is however not easy, especially when children get
older.
Foods are multimodal stimuli;
learned safety -> only when you eat it, you learn that a food is safe. OR
mere perception -> only perception of the food is enough to accept it.
Tasing vs. looking game; children are exposed in only looking or also tasting;
the more you taste something, the better tasting it becomes.
- Will teaching children to eat food at a young age have long term effects later?
Wadhera et al., 2015; currents liking of food and frequency of consumption in
childhood were asked to students.
Never eaten and currently disliked hold for every vegetable; if the students didn’t
eat a certain vegetable when they were young, they didn’t like it now.
Exposure lead to preference explanation is in line with experimental studies showing
effect of exposure
Alternative explanation -> children get offered foods they like and that’s why they
like it as an adult; only correlational evidence.
How can you best expose a child to the taste of food?
Children don’t like to be pressured into eating something (Galloway et al., 2006).
- Children start to like something more in a no pressure condition compared to a pressured
condition.
If-then reward in children; give a child access to a certain reward when they something you want
them to do.
- Instrumental form of conditioning; child started to like the juice less when offered as a
reward.
Over justification; child may make an inference -> if it has to lead to a reward, the
juice most not be good.
Negative-affect association because it feels effects of pressure or reactance.
,You can still create new habits with rewards (Loewenstein et al., 2016)
- Free choice situation; people have to experience a feeling of free choice for rewards to work;
rewards can’t evoke a negative effect in order to work.
- When a reward is offered for a longer period of time, habits can eventually develop.
You can also present the food itself as the reward (Birch et al., 1980)
- Different conditions; present the food as a reward, present the food with attention, put food
in a locker, or offer a certain type of food during snack time.
In the reward condition, the preference of the food went up.
If you present the food with attention to the child, it already starts to like it more;
attention from the caregiver may already be a reward on itself. -> mere exposure
could be interacted with an attention/positivity reward.
Putting it in the locker or presenting it during snack time didn’t work.
From a learning perspective, you should put more pressure and if-then rewards on bad eating habits
instead of good eating habits.
- Parents teach their children that some foods are nice and some are not; often, the “bad”
foods are offered as a reward, which is not good from a developmental perspective.
Postingestional learning
Satiation changes how food tastes; we like the taste of food better when it makes us feel more full.
Negative consequences of food also influence they way foods taste.
- Nausea changes how food taste, but pain/fever or cramps do not.
Other kinds of learning
Flavour-flavour conditioning; do children start to like something more if it is paired with something
they already like?
- Inconsistent results; may depend on if you still taste the flavour that it is compared with.
Modelling; adults saying encouraging things while eating sometimes work, but often this effect
seems to work better among peers than with adults.
, Lecture 2 – 1/2/2021
Intentions
Many people want to control their weight, but they find it difficult.
- How can psychologists help; why do people overeat, despite good intentions?
Intention-behaviour gap; they do not want it enough -> the vision now is that it is
not as simple, there is a gap between intention and behaviour.
Reduced responsiveness to internal signals of hunger and satiation; eat when not
hungry and keep eating when satiated.
Increased responsiveness to external food cues and obesogenic environment; in our
environment, there are a lot of cues about food.
Goal Conflict Model of Eating Behaviour (Stroebe et al., 2013)
Goal; cognitive representation of desirable outcomes -> anything positive that you can reach
towards.
- Once activated, they can cue attention and direction towards achieving your goal; motivate
behaviour towards attainment of the goal.
- Goal shielding; conflicted goals are inhibited, so other things are being ignored.
- Goals vary in a level of accessibility; the higher accessible a goal is, the more impact it has on
behaviour.
- Priming goals is an external reminder which switches the goal “on” and can influence
behaviour, even automatically.
People have difficulty regulating their weight because they experience a goal conflict; weight-loss
goal and eating enjoyment goal.
- 5 core assumptions of how these goals interact;
Seeing something tasty makes you want to eat
it, so cues signalling palatable food creates an
eating enjoyment goal.
Eating enjoyment and dieting goal are
incompatible, which leads to inhibition of
dieting goal.
The eating enjoyment goal dominates
attention.
Continuous processing of the hedonic value of
the eating enjoyment goal amplifies it.
Palatable (but unhealthy) foods will be consumed.
Not about conscious thought, but this is an automatic process.
- Group of restraint eaters is used to investigate this modal; have strong dieting goals, but an
unsuccessful regulation in dieting.
Probe recognition task; sentences describing eating vs. not eating behaviour and
palatable vs. neutral food.
After the sentence, a hedonic food probe appears, but never in a sentence.
Is the probe word part of the preceding sentence? -> reaction time towards hedonic
food probes. -> if it does activate an eating enjoyment goal, you might first be
inclined to say yes, so saying no takes more time.
Generally; people are a bit slower to say no if the sentence was involved with eating.
Restrained eaters; if preceding sentences involved palatable food, the reaction was
slower than the general group.
Conclusion; restrained eaters spontaneously activate eating enjoyment goal.
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