Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA.
Pediatr Obes. 2020 Oct;15(10):e12719. doi: 10.1111/ijpo.12719. Epub 2020 Sep 1.
Childhood obesity continues to be a critical health concern in the United States. Nonetheless, interventions that focus on delivering verbal lessons about food and health to children in preschool classrooms have had only modest effects.
The present study examines the relative effectiveness of showing vs telling children about food to promote healthy eating, with a focus on unfamiliar foods and vegetables.
Three- to six-year-old children (n = 71) were tested in a laboratory study in which they watched videos of two people eating apple-broccoli puree. One person took five bites of the food; the other said they liked the food.
Children did not differentiate between the food they saw someone eat and the food they heard someone talk about. Children's food intake was negatively associated with parent reports of children's eating behavior on the Food Fussiness subscale of the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire. We found similar patterns in an analogous toy task. In an unfamiliar object task, children selected the action demonstration as the right way to use the object.
We find no evidence that action vs verbal testimony is more persuasive in guiding children's food choices, but action testimony may be persuasive in other domains. The associations between children's food intake and pickiness provide growing evidence of alignment between parent assessments of their children's typical eating behavior and children's food choices in laboratory studies.
在美国，儿童肥胖仍然是一个严重的健康问题。尽管如此，专注于向学龄前儿童课堂传授关于食物和健康的口头知识的干预措施，效果也只是适度的。
本研究考察了向儿童展示与讲述食物以促进健康饮食相对有效的方法，重点关注不熟悉的食物和蔬菜。
3 至 6 岁的儿童（n = 71）在实验室研究中接受了测试，他们观看了两个人吃苹果-西兰花泥的视频。一个人吃了五口食物；另一个人说他们喜欢这种食物。
儿童并没有将他们看到的人吃的食物和听到的人谈论的食物区分开来。儿童的食物摄入量与父母报告的儿童在儿童饮食行为问卷的“食物挑剔”分量表上的饮食行为呈负相关。我们在类似的玩具任务中发现了类似的模式。在不熟悉的物体任务中，儿童选择了动作示范作为使用物体的正确方式。
我们没有发现动作示范与口头证言在引导儿童食物选择方面更有说服力的证据，但动作证言在其他领域可能具有说服力。儿童食物摄入量与挑食之间的关联为父母对其子女典型饮食行为的评估与儿童在实验室研究中的食物选择之间的一致性提供了越来越多的证据。
