Complete Eating Behaviour revision notes for AQA Psychology A-Level, written by a straight A* student. Includes PEEL paragraphs for every topic and diagrams where needed. Well organised and in order.
Includes collated information from class, textbooks and online. Topics include: Explanations for ...
Eating Behaviour
EEA - Environment of
Explanations for food preferences evolutionary adaptedness
The evolutionary explanation
‣ Focus on the adaptive bene ts that certain foods would have o ered our ancestors
who lived in a very di erent environment from us
‣ Having an innate preference for certain foods would have increased the chances that
an individual would survive, reproduce and pass on their genes to their o spring
‣ Through the process of natural selection, this meant that their genes would continue in
the gene pool, perpetuating and reinforcing this like or dislike of foods in the population
Food preferences to eat
Sweetness
‣ Associated with a high concentration of quickly available carbohydrates and calories
which leads to high-energy
‣ Ripe fruit was an example during the EEA
‣ High energy would makes you stronger and thus, more likely to survive
‣ These genes were passed on and have become a key preference in the gene pool
though they are not needed as much now to survive
‣ Fructose is especially sweet and babies will consume a large amount of it if they can
‣ Steiner (1977) placed sugar on the tongues of newborns and observed positive facial
expressions demonstrating the innate food preference
Salt
‣ Food preferences for salt have evolved and appear innate
‣ It begins at around 4 months as until then, babies cannot taste it as well and until 2
years they reject food that isn’t salty enough
‣ It is essential for cell functions and hydration
‣ Harris et al (1990) found that breastfed infants between the age of 16-25 weeks
preferred salted rather than unsalted foods
‣ As breast milk is low in salt, this suggests that preference for salt isn’t learnt
Fat
‣ Associated with being high in calories so providing energy to survive
‣ Fat contains twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrates so preferring fat is a
more e cient form of energy consumption
‣ Fat also makes food taste nice and appeals to our sense of taste so helps us consume
a varied diet which aids palatability
‣ Torres et al (2008) reviewed relevant studies and found we tend to prefer high-fat food
in periods of stress similar to the need for fat to help with the ght and ight response -
increasing survival advantage during the EEA
Neophobia
‣ An innate predisposition to avoid anything new
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, Eating Behaviour ESB
‣ Adaptive as it reduces the risk of unfamiliar objects, experiences and activities until we
learn they are safe
‣ It aids survival as children are more cautious of eating foods that may be poisonous
and will not until they see others eat it
‣ This can cause de ciencies and other negative health consequences
‣ Useful as children would have been less likely to fall ill and increases their chance of
survival, opening up to a more varied diet for essential nutrients
‣ Birch (1999) argues that children experience it between 2-6 years old
‣ This is the time when they begin to explore their environment and may encounter foods
independently so they know what is safe to eat and what isn’t
Taste aversion
‣ An innate predisposition to learn to avoid potentially toxic food
‣ Food that has spoiled often tastes bitter so it is bene cial for survival to be able to taste
these bitter compounds quickly to consume minimal amount of toxins
‣ A person can also learn to avoid eating foods that makes them ill or that they associate
with illness
‣ They are hard to shift as they are an adaptive quality that helped to keep our ancestors
alive
‣ If they survived eating toxic food, they will not make the same mistake again
‣ This quality allowed people to survive and reproduce, passing the taste aversion on
through the gene pool
‣ Steiner (1977) found babies demonstrate a negative facial expression (downturned
corners of mouth) in response to bitter tastes before learning any taste preference
‣ This indicates that taste aversions are a strong innate mechanism
KEY STUDY: Garcia and Koelling (1966)
Aim
To nd out if it is possible to demonstrate biological preparedness for taste aversions in
non-human animals.
Procedure
‣ Researchers paired a sweet-tasting liquid which is attractive to rats with an injection
containing lithium chloride which made them ill
‣ They also paired a sweet-tasting liquid with an electric shock
Findings
‣ The rats quickly learned to associate the sweet-tasting liquid with being ill when paired
with the poisonous injection and declined to drink it
‣ They had developed a taste aversion
‣ However, the rats continued to drink the sweet-tasting liquid when paired with the
electric shock
Conclusion
‣ The rats were biological predisposed to learn a taste aversion to the liquid when paired
with the poison as it is a natural adaptive behaviour
‣ They didn’t develop the taste aversion with the electric shock as rats have no natural
biological predisposition to avoid foods paired with electric shocks
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, Eating Behaviour ESB
WEAKNESS
P: Neophobia could be seen as potentially maladaptive in modern society.
E: Most of the food we consume is bought from retailers, so it is safer so it is more
plentiful and safer than it has ever been. So in today’s society, neophobia restricts the
variety of children’s diets by limiting what they eat.
E: This can lead to negative health consequences such as vitamin de ciencies.
L: Neophobia is harmful in a modern environment as it decreases survival advantage.
This shows the preference is adaptive as it increase survival advantage as those who
CP: Neophobia could still be useful in third-world countries so it is culturally biased.
ELAB: It is economically unfavourable due to the high costs for the NHS.
WEAKNESS
P: It ignores the in uence of culture on human diets.
E: Some diets preference umami foods whilst others preference salty foods. Poland and
Portugal have the highest salt intake in the world whilst Sweden and Finland have the
lowest salt intake in the world and Sweden preferences food with bre.
E: This demonstrates the extreme diversity in human diets between cultures and that
many have not evolved similar food preferences.
L: The evolutionary is not a satisfactory theory in explaining food preferences.
The role of learning in food preference
Classical conditioning
‣ Flavour- avour learning
‣ If a new food is paired with a avour we like, then we learn to like the food on its own
‣ We have an innate preference for sweetness so we often learn to like new foods by
sweetening them to make them more palatable
Operant conditioning
‣ Children’s food preferences can be reinforced by parents and siblings
‣ If a child is positively reinforced by being rewarded for eating healthy or punished for
eating badly, this makes it more/less likely they will repeat that food eating behaviour
Social in uences
Social learning theory - parental/sibling in uences
‣ Children acquire food preferences of role models they observe eating certain foods
‣ Children may watch other role models show a food preference on TV which they
reproduce due to vicarious reinforcement
‣ This can eliminate neophobia as observing a model eating a food without harmful
e ects means that the child knows it is safe and imitate the food eating behaviour
‣ Parents are the gatekeepers of their children’s eating so have powerful e ects on the
food preferences of the children
‣ Brown and Ogden (2004) reported consistent correlations between parent and
children in terms of snack food intake, eating motivations and body dissatisfaction
‣ Shows an association between parent and children attitudes
Peer in uences
‣ Birch (1990) arranged for participants to be placed at school lunch next to 3-4 other
children who had di erent vegetable preferences
‣ After 4 days, the children changed their preference to be similar to the other children
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