Errors as a Means of Reducing Impulsive Food Choice

Summary

Giving in to temptation of tasty food may result in long-term overweight problems. This protocol describes how to reduce imprudent preference for edible commodities during hypothetical intertemporal choices in women by associating them with errors.

Abstract

Nowadays, the increasing incidence of eating disorders due to poor self-control has given rise to increased obesity and other chronic weight problems, and ultimately, to reduced life expectancy. The capacity to refrain from automatic responses is usually high in situations in which making errors is highly likely. The protocol described here aims at reducing imprudent preference in women during hypothetical intertemporal choices about appetitive food by associating it with errors. First, participants undergo an error task where two different edible stimuli are associated with two different error likelihoods (high and low). Second, they make intertemporal choices about the two edible stimuli, separately. As a result, this method decreases the discount rate for future amounts of the edible reward that cued higher error likelihood, selectively. This effect is under the influence of the self-reported hunger level. The present protocol demonstrates that errors, well known as motivationally salient events, can induce the recruitment of cognitive control, thus being ultimately useful in reducing impatient choices for edible commodities.

Introduction

Nowadays, it is crucial to help people face the rise of eating disorders^1-4. These disorders reflect an overestimation of the incentive motivation associated with appetitive food, which induces individuals to seek and consume it as soon as possible (this has been shown especially with sweet high-fat foods^5-6). This happens at the expense of future benefits that can result from being on a diet for a while, but for which the ability to exert eating control is necessary^7-8. Indeed, people showing these abnormal behaviors have increased attentional bias toward edible cues^9-10 and experience enhanced incentive value for primary r....

Protocol

Ethics statement: All procedures described in this protocol were developed and tested following ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Psychology Department of Bologna University (see also the Declaration of Helsinki^23,53).

1. Participants

1. Select a sample of healthy young adult females.
   1. Recruit participants who are not on a diet, not taking psychoactive drugs, free of current or past psychiatric or neurological illness as determined by history, and naïve as to the purpose of the experiment.
2. Invite volunteers to sit in a quiet room and collect their demographics, incl....

Results

Representative results from the application of the protocol described above are reported here.

Error task

The validity of the Error task has been determined by the following results. Concerning the percentage of errors committed by participants, they showed a significantly higher number of errors in the HE than in the LE condition, a significantly higher number of erro.......

Discussion

This article describes in detail a novel protocol aimed at reducing impulsive food choice in healthy young adult women. Critical steps in this protocol include sampling participants from the healthy female population, collecting self-report hunger level at the time of the experiment, selecting two foods with equivalent incentive value for each subject, submitting participants to an error task where each of two different error likelihoods (high and low, randomly interspersed across trials) are associated with one of the t.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
E-Prime	PST		Stimulus Delivery Software
Statistica	Statsoft		Statistical Software