Department of Psychology, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria; Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.
Department of Psychology, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria; Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.
Appetite. 2021 Aug 1;163:105190. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2021.105190. Epub 2021 Mar 9.
Strong cravings for unhealthy foods and implicit tendencies to approach them threaten the physical and mental health of vulnerable populations. Yet, implicit measures of food approach tendencies have methodological limitations, as existing approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) are often unreliable and require specialized hardware. We propose a novel method to measure approach biases: on a touchscreen, participants slide their hand either toward a food item (and away from control images) or away from it (and toward control images) in separate blocks. Adequate attention to the stimuli is ensured by the coupling of stimulus category to the required response. We found that this touchscreen-variant of the AAT yielded reliable bias scores when approach and avoidance were defined as movements relative to the stimulus rather than to the body. Compared to control images, we found an approach bias for low-calorie foods but not for high-calorie foods. This bias additionally varied on a food-by-food basis depending on the participant's desire to eat individual food items. Correlations with state and trait cravings were inconclusive. Future research needs to address the order effects that were found, in which participants avoiding foods in the first block showed larger biases than participants approaching food in the first block, likely due to insufficient opportunity to practice the task. Our findings highlight the need for approach bias retraining paradigms to use personalized stimulus sets. The task can enrich the methodological repertoire of research on eating disorders, obesity and cognitive bias modification.
强烈渴望不健康的食物和接近它们的隐含倾向威胁到弱势群体的身心健康。然而，食物接近倾向的内隐测量存在方法学上的局限性，因为现有的接近回避任务（AAT）往往不可靠，并且需要专门的硬件。我们提出了一种测量接近偏差的新方法：在触摸屏上，参与者在单独的模块中滑动他们的手，向食物项目（远离控制图像）或远离它（向控制图像）。通过将刺激类别与所需的反应相结合，确保了对刺激的充分关注。我们发现，当接近和回避被定义为相对于刺激而不是身体的运动时，这种 AAT 的触摸屏变体产生了可靠的偏差分数。与控制图像相比，我们发现低卡路里食物存在接近偏差，但高热量食物不存在。这种偏差还根据参与者对个别食物的进食欲望在食物与食物之间有所不同。与状态和特质渴望的相关性没有定论。未来的研究需要解决发现的顺序效应，即在第一个模块中回避食物的参与者比在第一个模块中接近食物的参与者表现出更大的偏差，这可能是由于没有足够的机会练习任务。我们的研究结果强调了需要使用个性化刺激集的接近偏差再训练范式。该任务可以丰富进食障碍、肥胖和认知偏差修正研究的方法学。
