Beyond Affect and Cognition: Identification of the Informational Bases of Food Attitudes1

Two studies were conducted to identify the informational bases of food attitudes. Study 1 was an exploratory study in which participants indicated the importance of food characteristics and emotional reactions for determining their attitudes toward a variety of foods. On the basis of a series of exploratory factor analyses, 5 informational bases of food attitudes were identified: positive affect, negative affect, specific sensory qualities, abstract cognitive qualities, and general sensory qualities. A second confirmatory study corroborated the appropriateness of this 5‐factor structure. Furthermore, the food‐specific attitude structure model was found to have better fit than a more traditional attitude structure model. The implications of these findings for attitude theory, understanding eating behavior, and changing food selection are discussed.     

Food pleasantness affects visual selective attention

Fundamental to adaptive behaviour is the ability to select environmental objects that best satisfy current needs and preferences. Here we investigated whether temporary changes in food preference influence visual selective attention. To this end, we exploited the fact that when a food is eaten to satiety its motivational value and perceived pleasantness decrease relative to other foods not eaten in the meal, an effect termed sensory-specific satiety. A total of 26 hungry participants were fed until sated with one of two palatable foods. Before and after selective satiation, participants rated the pleasantness of the two foods and then viewed the same as stimuli on a computer screen while attention was assessed by a visual probe task. Results showed that the attentional bias for the food eaten decreased markedly from pre- to postsatiety, along with the subjective pleasantness for that food. By contrast, subjective pleasantness and attentional bias for the food not eaten did not show any such decrease. These findings suggest that the allocation of visual selective attention is flexibly and rapidly adjusted to reflect temporary shift in relative preference for different foods.     

Evaluating Eve: visceral states influence the evaluation of impulsive behavior

Impulsive behavior is a common source of stigma. The authors argue that people often stigmatize impulsive behavior because they fail to appreciate the influence visceral impulses have on behavior. Because people tend to underestimate the motivational force of cravings for sex, drugs, food, and so forth, they are prone to stigmatize those who act on these impulses. In line with this reasoning, in 4 studies, the authors found that participants who were in a cold state (e.g., not hungry) made less favorable evaluations of a related impulsive behavior (impulsive eating) than did participants who were in a hot state (e.g., hungry). This empathy gap effect was tested with 3 different visceral states--fatigue, hunger, and sexual arousal--and was found both when participants evaluated others' impulsive behavior (Studies 1 & 2) and when participants evaluated their own impulsive behavior (Study 3). Study 3 also demonstrated that the empathy gap effect is due to different perceptions of the strength of the visceral state itself. Finally, Study 4 revealed that this effect is state specific: Hungry people, for example, evaluated only hunger-driven impulses, and not other forms of impulse, more favorably.     

Are we aware of the external factors that influence our food intake?

OBJECTIVES: This research examines the extent to which people accurately report some of the external influences on their food intake. DESIGN: In two studies, specific factors (the presence and behavior of others) were manipulated in order to influence the amount of food that individuals consumed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The main outcomes of interest were participants' spontaneously generated explanations for their food intake (Study 1; n = 122), and their ratings of the importance of several potential determinants of food intake (Study 2; n = 75). RESULTS: In Study 1, there was high concordance between the amounts eaten by members of a dyad, but very few participants indicated that they were influenced by their partner's behavior; they instead identified hunger and taste as the primary determinants of intake. Study 2 showed that participants' intake was strongly influenced by the behavior of others, but people rated taste and hunger as much more important influences on their intake. CONCLUSIONS: If external environmental factors influence people's food intake without their awareness or acknowledgment, then maintaining a healthy diet can be a challenge, with long-term consequences for health and well-being.     

Emotional eating moderates the relationship between implicit measures of attitudes and chocolate consumption

Emotional eaters tend to eat more when emotionally aroused and their food‐related actions are associated with lack of control. Two studies tested the hypothesis that implicit measures of attitudes would be more strongly associated with the dietary behaviour of emotional eaters. In both Study 1 (N = 32) and Study 2 (N = 101), participants completed the DEBQ sub‐scale of emotional eating and implicit measures of attitude, explicit attitude and behaviour measures concerning chocolate consumption. In both studies, high emotional eaters were more likely than low emotional eaters to eat in line with their implicit measures of attitudes. The relationship between implicit measures of attitudes and food intake varies as a function of emotional eating style. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Attitude Functions Approach to Increasing Organ‐Donation Participation1

This research tests a tenet of attitude function theory–the motivational matching hypothesis–by using a functional approach to increase organ donation. Pilot studies validated experimental manipulations and persuasive messages. An experiment tested the hypothesis that persuasive messages that match an aroused function would be more effective than messages that do not match a manipulated function. Participants were exposed to situational manipulations designed to arouse or make salient value‐expressive or knowledge needs, then read an organ‐donation message designed to meet one of these needs. Participants’ organ‐donation attitudes and behaviors were assessed. Participants presented with matching messages were most persuaded and took more action to become donors. Those who experienced stronger motivational arousal exhibited the most change.     

Evidence That Self-Relevant Motives and Metaphoric Framing Interact to Influence Political and Social Attitudes

ABSTRACT— We propose that metaphor is a mechanism by which motivational states in one conceptual domain can influence attitudes in a superficially unrelated domain. Two studies tested whether activating motives related to the self-concept influences attitudes toward social topics when the topics' metaphoric association to the motives is made salient through linguistic framing. In Study 1, heightened motivation to protect one's own body from contamination led to harsher attitudes toward immigrants entering the United States when the country was framed in body-metaphoric, rather than literal, terms. In Study 2, a self-esteem threat led to more positive attitudes toward binge drinking of alcohol when drinking was metaphorically framed as physical self-destruction, compared with when it was framed literally or metaphorically as competitive other-destruction.     

Question-induced cognitive biases in reports of dietary intake by college men and women

In two experiments, investigated how variations in questionnaire structure influence respondents' reports of two aspects of dietary intake--the frequency with which various food items are eaten and the sizes of the portions that are eaten. In Experiment 1, approximately 400 subjects, prior to making a frequency judgment, were asked to think either about a specific occasion or about all the occasions on which they had eaten a particular food. The thoughts that preceded the frequency judgment influenced that judgment: Thinking of the range of occasions on which a food is consumed resulted in higher frequency estimates than thinking only of the most recent occasion. In Experiment 2, the same subjects made judgments about their typical portion sizes of several foods relative to described standards. For only one of eight foods were estimates properly and significantly affected by differences among the described standards. These results suggest that respondents are not particularly sensitive to portion-size definitions. We consider the implications of these phenomena for the development of a general theory of the cognitive processes that subserve health-survey responding.     

Predictive Validity of the Implicit Association Test in Studies of Brands,Consumer Attitudes,and Behavior

Three studies investigated implicit brand attitudes and their relation to explicit attitudes, product usage, and product differentiation. Implicit attitudes were measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Study 1 showed expected differences in implicit attitudes between users of two leading yogurt brands, also revealing significant correlations between IAT‐measured implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes. In Study 2, users of two fast food restaurants (McDonald's and Milk Bar) showed implicit attitudi‐nal preference for their favorite restaurant. In Study 3, implicit attitudes of users of two soft drinks (Coca‐Cola and Pepsi) predicted brand preference, product usage, and brand recognition in a blind taste test. A meta‐analytic combination of the three studies showed that the use of IAT measures increased the prediction of behavior relative to explicit attitude measures alone.     

Intragroup or Intergroup Attitude Projection Can Increase Opinion Certainty: Is There Classism at College?1

Two processes were examined by which estimation of the attitude positions of others can increase opinion certainty. In Study 1, sophomore and senior students exhibited greater conviction about their own opinions following an opportunity to estimate the attitudes of in‐group members compared to persons who did not receive this opportunity. In an out‐group projection condition, as expected, reduced attitude similarity to freshman students augmented the opinion certainty of sophomores only. In this condition, sophomore opinion certainty was predicted by their perceived status similarity to the freshman out‐group. In Study 2, the relationships between intergroup status similarity, projected intergroup attitudes, and increments in opinion certainty were reexamined and replicated. These findings are discussed in accord with the motivational and cognitive factors that account for the interface between group dynamics and attitude strength.     

Subjective Happiness and Emotional Responsiveness to Food Stimuli

Through three studies, this study aims to investigate the relationship between subjective happiness and responsiveness to eating and to foods. In Study 1, 299 Japanese undergraduates completed the Japanese subjective happiness scale and self-report questionnaires for attitudes toward eating and food. Study 1 revealed that in daily life, people with higher happiness levels show a stronger tendency to feel pleasure by eating than those with lower happiness levels. In Study 2, 26 Japanese undergraduates performed impression assessments for foods when looking at pictures of them. In Study 3, 22 Japanese undergraduates performed the same assessments when looking at real foods and eating them using a comparison with the data from pictures of non-food items as a control condition. The results of the study indicate that people with higher happiness levels show a stronger emotional response (happy and glad) to food stimuli than those with lower happiness levels. Even images of food were effective. No such group differences were observed for appetitive responses. It was also shown that emotional responses to the pictures of non-food items’ condition in the two groups did not differ. The present studies provided empirical evidence that subjective happiness has relevance to daily eating behavior and attitudes. Further studies should investigate the possibility that subjective happiness is related to a wide range of behavior and cognition in our daily life.     

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: an exploration of the PAST model

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.     

Lack of interference in long-term memory for socially learned food preferences in rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Outside the laboratory, rats (Rattus norvegicus) are likely both to interact with several conspecifics that have eaten various foods and to eat a variety of foods themselves before they encounter any particular food for which they have a socially enhanced preference. Here the authors examine the stability of rats' socially learned food preferences following 6 days of potentially disruptive ingestive experiences. The authors found that 6 days of (a) eating unfamiliar foods, (b) interacting with demonstrators that had eaten unfamiliar foods, or (c) both eating unfamiliar foods and interacting with demonstrators that had eaten those foods had no measurable effect on rats' socially learned food preferences. The stability of socially enhanced food preferences over time and despite potentially disruptive experiences is consistent with the view that social learning about foods is an important determinant of the food choices of free-living Norway rats.     

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short‐Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self‐interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short‐term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self‐reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes—the United Kingdom and Denmark—we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.     

The meal patterns of the oestrous cycle and their motivational significance

Food intake was monitored continuously throughout the oestrous cycle of the rat by operant methods. On the night of oestrus the size of meals eaten was reduced and the average intermeal interval was shorter; and even after meals of the same size, oestrous animals returned to eat again more quickly than dioestrous animals. These results suggest that the way in which ovarian oestrogens reduce food intake is by intensifying processes responsible for the short-term satiation of hunger without affecting the motivational processes responsible for its arousal. Signs of motivational arousal at oestrus could thus be the result of a self-imposed nutritional deprivation, rather than a direct effect of ovarian hormones on sexual receptivity.     

Beyond attitudinal ambivalence: effects of belief homogeneity on attitude‐intention‐behaviour relations

Attitudinal ambivalence extends the traditional unidimensional conceptualization of attitude by acknowledging that people can simultaneously evaluate attitude objects as positive and negative. The present paper argues that this bidimensional view of attitudes may be extended further to take account of multidimensional influences on attitudes using measures of belief homogeneity. Study 1 (n = 155) showed that attitudes based on homogeneous belief‐sets were significantly more predictive of subsequent behaviour (β = 0.47, p<0.01) than were attitudes based on heterogeneous belief‐sets (β = 0.08, ns). Study 2 (n = 136) manipulated belief homogeneity and found that when beliefs were made heterogeneous, attitudes based on heterogeneous belief‐sets were significantly less predictive of behavioural intentions (β = 0.46, p < 0.01) than attitudes based on homogeneous belief‐sets (β = 0.84, p < 0.01). Implications for research on attitudinal ambivalence and attribute importance are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interpersonal chemistry through negativity: Bonding by sharing negative attitudes about others

We propose that sharing a negative—as compared to a positive—attitude about a third party is particularly effective in promoting closeness between people. Findings from two survey studies and an experiment support this idea. In Studies 1 and 2, participants’ open‐ended responses revealed a tendency to recall sharing with their closest friends more negative than positive attitudes about other people. Study 3 established that discovering a shared negative attitude about a target person predicted liking for a stranger more strongly than discovering a shared positive attitude (but only when attitudes were weak). Presumably, sharing negative attitudes is alluring because it establishes in‐group/out‐group boundaries, boosts self‐esteem, and conveys highly diagnostic information about attitude holders. Despite the apparent ubiquity of this effect, participants seemed unaware of it. Instead, they asserted that sharing positive attitudes about others would be particularly effective in promoting closeness.     

The Effects of Moral and Pragmatic Arguments Against Torture on Demands for Judicial Reform

Torture can be opposed on the basis of pragmatic (e.g., torture does not work) or moral arguments (e.g., torture violates human rights). Three studies investigated how these arguments affect U.S. citizens' attitudes toward U.S.‐committed torture. In Study 1, participants expressed stronger demands for redressing the injustice of torture when presented with moral rather than pragmatic or no arguments against torture. Study 2 replicated this finding with an extended justice measure and also showed the moderating role of ingroup glorification and attachment. Moral arguments increased justice demands among those who typically react most defensively to ingroup‐committed wrongdoings: the highly attached and glorifying. Study 3 showed that the effect of moral arguments against torture on justice demands and support for torture among high glorifiers is mediated by moral outrage and empathy but not guilt.