The Child Food Rejection Scale: Development and validation of a new scale to assess food neophobia and pickiness among 2- to 7-year-old French children

IntroductionThe two strongest obstacles to extend children's consumption of fruit and vegetables are food neophobia and pickiness, assumed to be the main kinds of food rejection in children. Accordingly, psychometric tools that provide a clear assessment of these kinds of food rejections are greatly needed.ObjectiveTo design and validate a new scale for the assessment of food neophobia and pickiness, thus filling a major gap in the psychometric assessment of food rejection by French children.MethodWe concentrated on French children aged 2–7 years, as no such scale exists for this young population, and on the two known dimensions of food rejection, namely food neophobia and pickiness, as the nature of the relationship between them is still unclear. The scale was tested on two samples (N₁ = 168; N₂ = 256) of caregivers who responded for their children. Additionally, a food choice task was administered to 17 children to check the scale's predictive validity.ResultsThe resulting scale, called the Child Food Rejection Scale (CFRS), included six items relating to food neophobia and five items relating to pickiness. A factor analysis confirmed the two-dimensional structure of the scale. Internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity were all satisfactory. Moreover, results from the food choice task showed that scores on the CFRS accurately predicted children's attitudes toward new and familiar foods.ConclusionTaken together, these findings suggest that the CFRS, a short and easy-to-administer scale, represents a valuable tool for studying food rejection tendencies in French children.     

Don't Count Calorie Labeling Out: Calorie Counts on the Left Side of Menu Items Lead to Lower Calorie Food Choices

Providing calorie counts on restaurants’ menus/menu boards is one of the most prominent policy interventions that has been implemented to combat the obesity epidemic in America. However, previous research across multiple disciplines has found little effect of providing calorie counts on calories ordered, leading some to call calorie provision a failed policy. The authors propose that this failure is partly due to not considering how people process information when making food choices: Americans read from left‐to‐right, processing calorie information only after processing the food item's name. Thus, the authors test a simple way to improve the effectiveness of calorie counts: display calorie counts to the left (vs. right) of food items. A field study and a laboratory study with American participants found that calorie counts to the left (vs. right) decreased calories ordered by 16.31%. A final laboratory study demonstrated that this effect is reversed among Hebrew‐speakers, who read from right‐to‐left, providing further evidence that the order in which calorie information is processed matters. Accordingly, calling calorie labeling a policy failure may be premature.     

Using telehealth to provide outpatient follow‐up to children with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder

The COVID‐19 global health crisis compelled behavior analysts to consider alternatives to face‐to‐face services to treat children with feeding disorders. Research suggests telehealth is one method behavior analysts could use to initiate or continue assessment of and treatment for feeding disorders. In the current paper, we conducted pilot studies in which we analyzed chart records of patients with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder; who graduated from an intensive, day‐treatment program; and transitioned to an outpatient follow‐up program. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the data of participants who received follow‐up both in‐clinic and via telehealth. In Experiment 2, we analyzed goal attainment for participants who received outpatient follow‐up either in‐clinic exclusively or via telehealth exclusively. Results of both studies showed that outcomes were equivalent along most dimensions for in‐clinic and telehealth services. We provide recommendations for telehealth feeding services and discuss other considerations relevant to telehealth service delivery.     

A comparison of acceptance- and control-based strategies for coping with food cravings: an analog study

The present study utilized an analog paradigm to investigate the effectiveness of two strategies for coping with food cravings, which was theorized to be critical to the maintenance of weight loss. Ninety-eight undergraduate students were given transparent boxes of chocolate Hershey's Kisses and instructed to keep the chocolates with them, but not to eat them, for 48 h. Before receiving the Kisses, participants were randomized to receive either (a) no intervention, (b) instruction in control-based coping strategies such as distraction and cognitive restructuring, or (c) instruction in acceptance-based strategies such as experiential acceptance and defusion techniques. Measures included the Power of Food Scale (PFS; a measure of psychological sensitivity to the food environment), self-report ratings of chocolate cravings and surreptitiously recorded chocolate consumption. Results suggested that the effect of the intervention depended on baseline PFS levels, such that acceptance-based strategies were associated with better outcomes (cravings, consumption) among those reporting the highest susceptibility to the presence of food, but greater cravings among those who scored lowest on the PFS. It was observed that craving self-report measures predicted chocolate consumption, and baseline PFS levels predicted both cravings and consumption. Results are discussed in terms of the implications for weight loss maintenance strategies.     

Loss of control eating and psychological maintenance in children: An ecological momentary assessment study

Objective

Recent research suggests that binge eating is a common experience in youth. However, it remains largely unknown how children's binge eating presents in everyday life and which psychological factors serve to maintain this binge eating.

Methods

Children aged 8-13 years with binge eating (n = 59), defined as at least one episode of loss of control (LOC) over eating within the past three months, and 59 matched children without LOC history were recruited from the community. Following a combined random- and event-sampling protocol, children were interviewed about their day-to-day eating behavior, mood, and eating disorder-specific cognitions using child-specific cell phones during a 4-day assessment period in their natural environment.

Results

LOC episodes led to a significantly greater intake of energy, particularly from carbohydrates, than regular meals of children with and without LOC eating. While LOC episodes were preceded and followed by cognitions about food/eating and body image, there was minimal evidence that negative mood states were antecedents of LOC eating.

Conclusions

The results provide support for the construct validity of LOC eating in children. Maintenance theories of binge eating for adults apply to children regarding eating disorder-specific cognitions, but the association with affect regulation difficulties requires further investigation.     

Core knowledge and its limits: The domain of food

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure, Experiment 1 extended previous findings that rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) generalize learning about novel food objects by color over changes in shape. Six additional experiments then investigated whether human infants show the same signature patterns of perception and generalization. Nine-month-old infants failed to detect food objects in accord with their intrinsic properties, in contrast to rhesus monkeys tested in previous research with identical displays. Eight-month-old infants did not privilege substance information over other features when categorizing foods, even though they detected and remembered this information. Moreover, infants showed the same property generalization patterns when presented with foods and tools. The category-specific patterns of perception and categorization shown by human adults, children, and adult monkeys therefore were not found in human infants, providing evidence for limits to infants’ domains of knowledge.     

Conformism in the food processing techniques of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus)

Researchers of “culture” have long been interested in the role of social learning in establishing patterns of behavioral variation in wild animals, but very few studies examine this issue using a developmental approach. This 7-year study examines the acquisition of techniques used to process Luehea candida fruits in a wild population of white-faced capuchin monkeys, Cebus capucinus, residing in and near Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve, Costa Rica. The two techniques for extracting seeds (pounding or scrubbing) were approximately equal in efficiency, and subjects experimented with both techniques before settling on one technique—typically the one they most frequently observed. In a sample of 106 subjects that had already settled on a preferred technique, the females adopted the maternal technique significantly more often than expected by chance, but the males did not. Using a longitudinal approach, I examined the acquisition of Luehea processing techniques during the first 5 years of life. Regression analysis revealed that the technique most frequently observed (measured as proportion of Luehea processing bouts observed that used pounding as opposed to scrubbing) significantly predicted the technique adopted by female observers, particularly in the second year of life; the amount of impact of the observed technique on the practiced technique was somewhat less significant for male observers. These results held true for (a) observations of maternal technique only, (b) observations of technique used by all individuals other than the mother, and (c) observations of maternal and non-maternal techniques combined. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Dietary patterns and intelligence in early and middle childhood

The association between intelligence and diet at 3.5 and 7 years was examined in 591 children of European descent. Approximately half of the children were born small-for-gestational age (birth weight ≤ 10th percentile). The relationship between IQ and diet (measured by food frequency) was investigated using multiple regression analyses. Eating margarine at least daily was associated with significantly lower IQ scores at 3.5 years in the total sample and at 7 years in SGA children. For all children, eating the recommended daily number of breads and cereals was associated with significantly higher IQ scores at 3.5 years, and those who ate fish at least weekly had significantly higher IQ scores at 7 years than those who did not. The consumption of fish, breads and cereals commeasurable with nutritional guidelines may be beneficial to children's cognitive development. In contrast, consuming margarine daily was associated with poorer cognitive functioning. Further research is needed to identify the nutrients that may underlie this association.     

The smart gut: Tracking affective associative learning with measures of “liking”, facial electromyography, and preferential looking

We demonstrate here that initially neutral items can acquire specific value based on their associated outcomes, and that responses of physiological systems to such previously meaningless stimuli can rapidly reflect this associative history. Each participant participated in an associative learning task in which four neutral abstract pictures were each repeatedly paired with one of four foods that varied in valence and magnitude. Over the course of learning, participants’ “liking” ratings of and preferences for each picture came to reflect the value of the food with which it was paired. The abstract pictures also elicited physiological responses characteristic of the foods with which they were paired, including changes in facial electromyography (EMG) and preferential looking. A logistic modeling procedure showed that learning parameters, such as the rate at which participants learned the values associated with the pictures, were similar across food outcomes of different value.