FlashReportsThree ways to resist temptation: The independent contributions of executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation to the impulse control of eating behavior☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 122 female participants from the University of Würzburg, Germany, with a mean age of 23 years and a mean body mass index (BMI) of 22.24. Participants were recruited via Internet and newspaper advertisements and compensated for participation (approx. $5). Four participants failed to perform some of the experimental tasks satisfactorily (see below). Thus, the final sample consisted of 118 participants.
Automatic affective reactions
We assessed participants’ automatic affective reactions toward peanut m&m’s
Results
Because candy consumption was positively skewed (s = 1.09), we applied a log-transformation to achieve homogeneity of variance (Hofmann et al., 2007, Vohs and Heatherton, 2000). All statistical analyses were done using the transformed data. For ease of interpretation, however, mean values are reported in untransformed grams of candy consumption. As can be seen from Table 1, both automatic affective reactions and explicit liking were positively associated with candy consumption.
Discussion
The present findings are the first to show the independent contribution of executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation on the control of impulsive determinants of eating behavior (i.e., automatic affective reactions). Specifically, automatic affective reactions toward m&m’s candy had a weaker influence on subsequently assessed candy consumption for individuals above-average (as compared to below-average) in executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation.
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Cited by (0)
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We thank Julia Archut and Simone Gruß for their help in data collection.