Negative Mood Induce Attention Bias For Food Cues And Eating Behaviour Among Restrained Eaters

Restrained eaters are chronic diets those who has kind characters like continuity、 strong motivation, they pay long time attention to body shape> weight and eating, they attempt to limit their food intake inorder to lose weight or keep ideal shape but always fail,most of those people are women. Restrained eaters are very common in daily life, and they have a high risk to become patients with clinical, however, there are more and more research to discuss the reason why their dieting end with unsuccessful. Meanwhile, mood have been shown to influence eating behaviour of human beings, researchers are also put forward many theories to explain the relationship between mood and restrained eaters, among them, the boundary theory points out that the mood especially negative mood can break the diet boundary of restrained eaters, lead them to increase food intake, and then fail to lose weight. Most of previous studies based on boundary theory focused on the difference between restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters, and the dependent variable was almost food intake. Results found from these studies were conformed to the boundary theory.In recent years, numerous studies have found that there are two subgroups among the restrained eaters, one of them can be successful to go on a diet while another cannot. And investigating the reason why some can success but some fail also focused on the attention bias and self-control, ect. This study embarks from the mood, try to explore whether negative mood is one of the reason lead unsuccessful restrained eaters to fail in their dieting, and how it affects successful restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters?In experiment1, we used a visual-probe task to investigate whether there was difference between those three types of participants(unsuccessful/successful restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters) on the attention bias for food cues when the stimulus shown for500ms or2000ms and subject feeling to these food. The sample were all females included62successful restrained eaters、62unsuccessful restrained eaters and62unrestrained eaters recuited from the undergraduate population of the Southwest University. The2(time course:500ms or2000ms)×2(reduce condition:negative mood or neutral mood)×3(participant type:unsuccessful restrained esters, successful restrained eaters or unrestrained eaters) mixed design, with time course was within-subject variables, reduce condition and participant type were between-subject variables. The ANOVA showed a interaction affect between reduce condition and participant type. Although the unsuccessful restrained eaters denied eating impulses on subjective, they did have a significant attention bias on the duration of500ms and2000ms. While successful restrained eaters denied or even inhibit eating impulse on subjective,and they also had no attention bias to food cues. Unrestrained eaters were not affected by negative mood, there was no difference on the attention bias between negative mood induce and neutral mood induce.Based on experiment1, in experiment2, we used a simple visual search task which was a fake task, and food intake as the real dependent variable to investigate whether there is difference between unsuccessful restrained eaters、successful restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters on their food intake. The2(reduce condition:negative mood or neutral mood)×3(participant type:unsuccessful restrained esters, successful restrained eaters or unrestrained eaters) design, the ANOVA showed a interaction affect between reduce condition and participant type. The unsuccessful restrained eaters significantly increased food intake under negative mood induce compare to neutral mood, while successful restrained eaters increased slightly but far less than significant level, unrestrained eaters had a tendency to reduce food intake.Overall, the results consistent with the expected, unsuccessful restrained eaters enhanced the attention bias for food cues and increased food intake, while successful restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters didn’t. The study provided a perspective for the reason why the restrained eaters fail to lose weight, and it also provided theoretic guidance to prevent and interrupt overweight.