The Study On Restrained Eaters’ Disinhibition Effect

Food is an important part for survival and daily life, but another problem has raised up in food-rich environments, that is how to successfully control one’s weight. Many people lose weight by restraint food-intake, but in fact they often indulge in overeating,this made their weight control model cannot be reached. Restricted eating refers to consistent, cognitively-mediated efforts to restrict eating for the purpose of weight control. Numerous studies has shown consistently that restrained eating can predict the development of bing eating, overweight and obesity, and is also the key factor to the transmission from abnormal mental to abnormal behaviors in the development of eating disorders. In all factors that can induce disinhibition eating, preload is mostly researched and most classical.Herman and Mack (1975) firstly found that when restrained eaters taste highly calorific and normally forbidden food (milk shake),then induced a violation of their diet boundary. Following their study, the preload paradigm became very popular, but a few of these studies replicated the original experimental paradigm. Others manipulated the perceived rather than the actual calorie content of the preload.The results about disinhibition effect are inconsistent at the present,as some studies has found the disinhibition effect, but some not. At the same time, most of the studies about restrained eaters’ disinhibition effect are focus on their food-intake, but few studies investigate their attention bias and inhibitory control. Moreover, as there will be some difference between successful and unsuccessful restrained eaters when they confront with the palatable food cues, we made a distinction between successful and unsuccessful restrained eaters, to explore the mental mechanism under the disinhibition effect and to explain why most dieters fail but some succeed.The present study include three experiments,90 female participants (30 successful restrained eaters,30 unsuccessful restrained eaters,30 unrestrained eaters) were involved.In the experiment 1,we chose the odd-one-out task to investigate their attention bias after the preload food-intake. In the experiment 2, we used a two-choice oddball task to investigate their inhibitory control ability after the preload food-intake. In the study 3, the state food curving scale was used to explore their wanting for food at present. We found that:(1) Both successful and unsuccessful restrained eaters display display speeded detection of food stimuli. But they do not experience more difficulty shifting attention away from food cues after the high-calorie preload.(2) Unsuccessful restrained eaters showed more weakly inhibitory control than unrestrained eaters after the high-calorie preload, but the difference in successful and unsuccessful restrained eaters is not significant.(3) At the same time, the score in the state food curving scale of unsuccessful restrained eaters is higher than successful restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters after the high- calorie preload, moreover, A positive correlation has been found between food curving and impulsion, and a negative correlation has been found between food curving and PSRS.The goal conflict model represents the goal of eating enjoyment is primed by cues signaling palatable food in unsuccessful restrained eaters while the goal of weight control is primed in successful restrained eaters. This can explain the difference between unsuccessful restrained eaters and unsuccessful restrained eaters in food curving.The present study found that the successful restrained eaters had less food curving than unsuccessful restrained eaters, to a certain extent, proclaiming the reason why successful restrained eaters can succeed. There need more intervene studies in the future to found the pathway how to transform the unsuccessful restrained eaters to successful restrained eaters, making them more successful in control their weight.