Junghans Astrid F, Hooge Ignace T C, Maas Josje, Evers Catharine, De Ridder Denise T D
Self-regulation Lab, Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Eat Behav. 2015 Apr;17:90-3. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2015.01.009. Epub 2015 Feb 7.
Visually attending to unhealthy food creates a desire to consume the food. To resist the temptation people have to employ self-regulation strategies, such as visual avoidance. Past research has shown that self-regulatory skills develop throughout childhood and adolescence, suggesting adults' superior self-regulation skills compared to children.
This study employed a novel method to investigate self-regulatory skills. Children and adults' initial (bottom-up) and maintained (top-down) visual attention to simultaneously presented healthy and unhealthy food were examined in an eye-tracking paradigm.
Results showed that both children and adults initially attended most to the unhealthy food. Subsequently, adults self-regulated their visual attention away from the unhealthy food. Despite the children's high self-reported attempts to eat healthily and importance of eating healthily, children did not self-regulate visual attention away from unhealthy food. Children remained influenced by the attention-driven desire to consume the unhealthy food whereas adults visually attended more strongly to the healthy food thereby avoiding the desire to consume the unhealthy option.
The findings emphasize the necessity of improving children's self-regulatory skills to support their desire to remain healthy and to protect children from the influences of the obesogenic environment.
视觉上关注不健康食品会产生食用该食品的欲望。为了抵制这种诱惑，人们必须采用自我调节策略，比如视觉回避。过去的研究表明，自我调节技能在整个童年和青少年时期不断发展，这表明成年人的自我调节技能比儿童更强。
本研究采用一种新颖的方法来调查自我调节技能。在一个眼动追踪范式中，研究了儿童和成年人对同时呈现的健康和不健康食品的初始（自下而上）和持续（自上而下）视觉注意力。
结果显示，儿童和成年人最初都最关注不健康食品。随后，成年人会自我调节其视觉注意力，使其远离不健康食品。尽管儿童自我报告中表示有很高的意愿尝试健康饮食，且健康饮食很重要，但儿童并没有自我调节视觉注意力使其远离不健康食品。儿童仍然受到由注意力驱动的食用不健康食品欲望的影响，而成年人则更强烈地将视觉注意力集中在健康食品上，从而避免了食用不健康食品选项的欲望。
研究结果强调了提高儿童自我调节技能的必要性，以支持他们保持健康的愿望，并保护儿童免受致胖环境的影响。
