The Conflict Monitoring Of Restrained Eaters: A Single Food Choice Task

Restrained eating is generally defined as the intentional and sustained restriction of caloric intake for the purpose of weight loss or weight maintenance. Restrained eaters are referred to chronic dieters for they are strongly concerned about their weight.With the worldwide change of food environment, especially the more diverse and cheaper of food, such as eating disorders and obesity have drawn close attention in public. Because its key point in the course of translating a maladaptive psychological status into a behavioral phenomenon, restrained eating has been the hot spot. Meanwhile, as has been supported by numerous studies, restrained eaters are apt to fail in pursuit for their goal. Therefore, the reasons why they fail and the suggestion how to improve it has been the focal topic of related studies.According to conflict monitoring model and self-control theory, restrained eating is characterized as the process of conflict monitoring and resolve between the food temptation and dieting goal. However, as to the function of conflict monitoring, these two models hold a different view: conflict monitoring model assume that conflict monitoring can affect the outcome of restrained eating; whereas self-control theory thought that conflict monitoring cannot affect the outcome of restrained eating.Recent research by van der Laan and colleagues, however, began to question the hypothesis. Van der Laan found that weight-concerned women do not experience internal conflict when confronted with conflict trials, as demonstrated by lower reaction times, fixation durations, number of gaze switches between snacks, and lower activation of the anterior cingulate cortex.Nevertheless, owing to the subjective and dynamic trait of conflict monitoring, the hypothesis can be more validly testified by event-related potentials(ERPs) with high temporal precision instead of fMRI with poor temporal precision.Therefore, this study used ERPs to proverb the conflict monitoring of restrained eaters when they completed a single food choice task.Results indicated that:(1) The conflict monitoring level of subjects in single food choice task could affect the outcome of food choice;(2) Priming the diet-related words before the single food choice task can lower the possibility of choosing to eat food;(3) The reason why priming the diet-related words can be beneficial is that subjects may learn to lower the level of conflict monitoring when they choose to eat food and higher the level of conflict monitoring when choose to not eat food.In sum, this study found that the level of conflict monitoring can help subjects with the outcome of single food choice task, and the underlying reason is that priming the diet-related words can help subjects to lower the level of conflict monitoring when they choose to eat food and higher the level of conflict monitoring when choose to not eat food.