Department of General Psychiatry, Heidelberg University, Vossstrasse 4, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany; Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, LWL-University, Ruhr-University Bochum, Alexandrinenstrasse 1-3, 44791 Bochum, Germany.
Appetite. 2013 Dec;71:32-9. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2013.07.008. Epub 2013 Jul 27.
Overeating, weight gain and obesity are considered as a major health problem in Western societies. At present, an impairment of response inhibition and a biased salience attribution to food-associated stimuli are considered as important factors associated with weight gain. However, recent findings suggest that the association between an impaired response inhibition and salience attribution and weight gain might be modulated by other factors. Thus, hunger might cause food-associated cues to be perceived as more salient and rewarding and might be associated with an impairment of response inhibition. However, at present, little is known how hunger interacts with these processes. Thus, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether hunger modulates response inhibition and attention allocation towards food-associated stimuli in normal-weight controls. A go-/nogo task with food-associated and control words and a visual dot-probe task with food-associated and control pictures were administered to 48 normal-weight participants (mean age 24.5 years, range 19-40; mean BMI 21.6, range 18.5-25.4). Hunger was assessed twofold using a self-reported measure of hunger and a measurement of the blood glucose level. Our results indicated that self-reported hunger affected behavioral response inhibition in the go-/nogo task. Thus, hungry participants committed significantly more commission errors when food-associated stimuli served as distractors compared to when control stimuli were the distractors. This effect was not observed in sated participants. In addition, we found that self-reported hunger was associated with a lower number of omission errors in response to food-associated stimuli indicating a higher salience of these stimuli. Low blood glucose level was not associated with an impairment of response inhibition. However, our results indicated that the blood glucose level was associated with an attentional bias towards food-associated cues in the visual dot probe task. In conclusion our results suggest that hunger induces an approach bias and is associated with an impairment of response inhibition when normal-weight participants are confronted with food-associated cues. These findings are important as these processes play a crucial role with regard to the control of food-intake and weight gain and are assumed to contribute to obesity. Thus, individualized treatment approaches taking into account the experience of hunger in everyday-life situations should be considered in addition to a training of response inhibition.
进食过量、体重增加和肥胖被认为是西方社会的主要健康问题。目前，反应抑制受损和对与食物相关的刺激物的偏向显著性归因被认为是与体重增加相关的重要因素。然而，最近的研究结果表明，反应抑制和显著性归因受损与体重增加之间的关联可能受到其他因素的调节。因此，饥饿可能会导致与食物相关的线索被感知为更显著和更有回报，并可能与反应抑制受损有关。然而，目前人们对饥饿如何与这些过程相互作用知之甚少。因此，本研究的目的是探讨饥饿是否会调节正常体重对照组对与食物相关的刺激物的反应抑制和注意力分配。使用与食物相关和控制词的 go-/nogo 任务以及与食物相关和控制图片的视觉点探测任务，对 48 名正常体重的参与者（平均年龄 24.5 岁，范围 19-40；平均 BMI 21.6，范围 18.5-25.4）进行了测试。使用自我报告的饥饿感测量和血糖水平测量来双重评估饥饿感。我们的研究结果表明，自我报告的饥饿感会影响 go-/nogo 任务中的行为反应抑制。因此，与控制刺激物作为干扰物相比，饥饿的参与者在与食物相关的刺激物作为干扰物时，做出错误反应的情况更为严重。饱腹的参与者则没有出现这种情况。此外，我们发现，与食物相关的刺激物的反应漏报错误数量与自我报告的饥饿感有关，表明这些刺激物的显著性更高。血糖水平与反应抑制受损无关。然而，我们的研究结果表明，血糖水平与视觉点探测任务中对与食物相关的线索的注意力偏向有关。总之，我们的研究结果表明，当正常体重的参与者面对与食物相关的线索时，饥饿会引起趋近偏差，并与反应抑制受损有关。这些发现很重要，因为这些过程对于控制食物摄入和体重增加起着至关重要的作用，并且被认为是导致肥胖的原因之一。因此，除了反应抑制训练之外，还应该考虑针对日常生活中饥饿体验的个体化治疗方法。
