The Effect Of Imagination On Food Choice Of Spicy Food Cravers And Its Brain Mechanism

The eating habits of spicy food are widely popular in many areas of China.It has been found that although spicy food can cause pain sensation to individuals,people who prefer spicy food will produce endorphins with analgesic effect during eating.Therefore,this kind of "benign self-abuse" is also the reason why people love spicy food.These factors lead to the irresistible attitude towards spicy food,and even more so,the phenomenon of craving for spicy food.As an abnormal eating phenomenon,food craving itself will lead to greedy eating,negative emotions and the occupation of cognitive resources.Therefore,it is of great public health value to explore the eating behavior and neural mechanism of spicy food cravings,and further intervention research.As a theory of food craving,the Elaborated Intrusive Theory has been widely verified and widely used theoretical models,and has constructed a relatively perfect craving process model.The model explains that external stimuli about craving goals will combine with the previous experience to produce a response to their expectations,which makes Craver produce the idea related to the desire,including the vivid imagination of the craving goal and the idea of satisfying the craving.These imaginations and claims will slightly satisfy the desire,but will also strengthen the awareness of the actual lack,and then want to use the vivid imagination or expected gratification to alleviate the negative emotions that the craving is not actually satisfied.This reinforcing cycle will finally urge the Craver to satisfy his craving through the extreme behavior.Imagination has the characteristics of convenience and richness,so we can intervene the different stages of craving through different types of imagination,including episodic future thinking(also known as expectation imagination)acting on the invasion of external cue,resource competitive imagination acting on the internal craving processing stage,craving target imagination acting on the relief stage of negative emotions.Therefore,according to the characteristics of spicy food cravers,we focus on the theme of "the influence of multi-sensory imagination on the food choice of spicy food cravers and its neural mechanism".Firstly,we explore the effective imaginative intervention methods for spicy food cravers,and then we try to further explore the brain activity mode of intervention combined with f MRI technology.In the first study,we try to use landscape imagination as the content of resource competitive imagination,which requires us to imagine all kinds of sensory stimuli in the landscape in detail,reducing the vividness of the spicy food mental image generated during the spicy food craving,and then reducing the spicy food craving and subsequent intake of the amount of spicy food.However,the results of the study did not find the impact of landscape imagination on spicy food craving and choice of portion.Study 2 tried to use the multi-sensory imagination of spicy food to reduce the amount of spicy food intake.It was required to imagine the stimulation of multiple sensory dimensions such as sight,smell,taste and hearing,and the control group was to imagine non-spicy food.It was found that the multi-sensory imagination of spicy foods helps cravers reduce the intake of spicy foods,and doesn't affect non-spicy food cravers.Study 3 combines the specific results of the spicy food cravers in Study 2 and further explores the specific neural mechanism of the cravers in intervention.This study adopts the same experimental paradigm as that of Study 2,repeated in the functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI)experiment,and increased the times of food choices after imagination in order to obtain more accurate behavioral results.The behavioral results of Study 3 verified the results of Study 2,and the difference between the experimental group and the control group was tested for brain activity in the imagination stage and food selection stage.At the time,the activity of the brain area of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex(vm PFC)was weaker than that of non-spicy food.This brain area involved in general reward processing,indicating that imagining spicy food loses food's reward value instead of increaseing the crave,and thus cravers chooses to eat less food.In the subsequent food selection stage,brain imaging data also found positive activation of anterior insula,inferior frontal gyrus(IFG),and Anterior cingulate cortex(ACC)in the spicy food imaging group.These brain regions are all related to inhibitory control,shows that the craver's implicit attitude towards the inhibition of spicy food.When the craving for spicy food is satisfied,this implicit attitude will reduce the craver's subsequent portion choice of spicy food.In summary,this study found that the multi-sensory imagination of spicy foods can help spicy food cravers reduce the choice of the amount of spicy food.Further f MRI studies have found the relationship between this effect and the reward brain area,the inhibit and control brain area.This study is the first imaginative intervention in the craving behavior of the spicy food cravers,which expands and enriches the Elaborated Intrusion Theory,and reveals the inner neural basis of spicy food craving,which has theoretical innovation significance.