Tzavella Loukia, Chambers Christopher D
Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, CF24 4HQ, UK.
J Cogn. 2023 Jan 17;6(1):10. doi: 10.5334/joc.256. eCollection 2023.
The overvaluation of reward-associated stimuli such as energy-dense foods can drive compulsive eating behaviours, including overeating. Previous research has shown that training individuals to inhibit their responses towards appetitive stimuli can lead to their devaluation, providing a potential avenue for behaviour change. Over two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether training participants to inhibit their responses to specific foods would be effective in reducing their evaluations when these were assessed using both explicit and implicit measures. Participants completed an online session of go/no-go training with energy-dense foods that were consistently associated with either responding (go) or inhibiting a response (no-go). An 'explicit' devaluation effect was expected as a reduction in self-reported liking from pre-to post-training for no-go items compared to both go items and foods that were not presented during training (untrained items). An 'implicit' devaluation effect was then measured using the affective priming paradigm, by comparing differences in reaction times for congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., priming effects) between food primes. Experiment 1 revealed conclusive evidence for small-to-medium devaluation effects both in terms of explicit ratings and priming effects. We also observed that the priming effect for no-go items was close to zero. Experiment 2 successfully replicated most of the preregistered and exploratory outcomes from Experiment 1 except for the priming effect for untrained items. Potential explanations for this discrepancy are discussed but overall, these findings provide further support for a devaluation effect of response inhibition training. To our knowledge, our study provides the first evidence that training-induced devaluation can potentially be captured by affective priming measures, but more research is needed to further assess their sensitivity before they can be used to elucidate the mechanisms of action underlying devaluation effects.
对高热量食物等与奖励相关的刺激的高估会引发强迫性进食行为，包括暴饮暴食。先前的研究表明，训练个体抑制对诱人刺激的反应可导致其价值贬低，这为行为改变提供了一条潜在途径。在两项预先注册的实验中，我们研究了训练参与者抑制对特定食物的反应，在使用显性和隐性测量方法进行评估时，是否能有效降低他们对这些食物的评价。参与者完成了一个在线的“是/否”训练环节，训练对象是高热量食物，这些食物始终与做出反应（是）或抑制反应（否）相关联。预期会出现“显性”贬值效应，即与“是”项目以及训练期间未呈现的食物（未训练项目）相比，但与未训练项目相比，从训练前到训练后，“否”项目的自我报告喜好度会降低。然后，使用情感启动范式测量“隐性”贬值效应，通过比较食物启动刺激之间一致和不一致试验（即启动效应）的反应时间差异。实验1揭示了在显性评分和启动效应方面存在中小程度贬值效应的确凿证据。我们还观察到，“否”项目的启动效应接近零。实验2成功复制了实验1中大多数预先注册和探索性的结果，但未训练项目的启动效应除外。讨论了这种差异的潜在解释，但总体而言，这些发现为反应抑制训练的贬值效应提供了进一步支持。据我们所知，我们的研究首次证明，训练引起的贬值效应可能可以通过情感启动测量来捕捉，但在用于阐明贬值效应背后的作用机制之前，还需要更多研究来进一步评估它们的敏感性。
