School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia.
Obes Rev. 2024 Oct;25(10):e13801. doi: 10.1111/obr.13801. Epub 2024 Aug 2.
Episodic future thinking (EFT) strengthens self-regulation abilities by increasing the perceived value of long-term reinforcements and reducing impulsive choice in delay discounting tasks. As such, EFT interventions have the potential to improve dietary and eating-related decision-making in individuals with obesity or binge eating symptoms, conditions associated with elevated delay discounting. Here, we meta-analyzed evidence from 12 studies that assessed whether EFT interventions improve delay discounting and real-world food choice compared to control interventions. Included studies involved 951 adults with overweight or obesity (body mass index [BMI] ≥25). There were no studies involving participants with binge eating disorder. EFT intervention pooled effects were significant, improving delay discounting with a medium effect, g = 0.55, p < 0.0001, and subsequent food choice outcomes with a small effect, g = 0.31, p < 0.01. Notably, our review is the first to analyze mechanisms of effect in this population, demonstrating that improvements were greater when temporal horizons of EFT episodes were aligned with delay discounting tasks and more distant horizons predicted far-transfer to subsequent dietary and eating-related choices. Our findings thus show that EFT is an effective intervention for individuals with higher weight at risk of adverse health consequences.
片段式未来思考（EFT）通过增加长期奖励的感知价值和减少延迟折扣任务中的冲动选择来增强自我调节能力。因此，EFT 干预有可能改善肥胖或暴食症状个体的饮食和相关饮食决策，这些条件与延迟折扣增加有关。在这里，我们对 12 项评估 EFT 干预是否比对照干预改善延迟折扣和现实世界食物选择的研究进行了荟萃分析。纳入的研究涉及 951 名超重或肥胖成年人（体重指数 [BMI] ≥25）。没有涉及暴食障碍患者的研究。EFT 干预的综合效果显著，改善延迟折扣的效果中等，g=0.55，p<0.0001，随后的食物选择效果较小，g=0.31，p<0.01。值得注意的是，我们的综述是首次分析该人群中效应的机制，表明当 EFT 片段的时间范围与延迟折扣任务相匹配时，效果会更好，而更远的时间范围则预示着对随后的饮食和相关饮食选择的远转移。因此，我们的研究结果表明，EFT 是一种针对有不良健康后果风险的高体重个体的有效干预措施。
