Study On The Relationship Between Food Craving And Inhibition Control

Food craving is an irresistible desire to consume a particular food(or a class of food).Strong food craving is one of the important factors leading to overweight and obesity,and obesity will have a negative impact on the physical and mental health of adolescents.At present,there is no general consensus on the causes of adolescent obesity,but most researchers believe that inhibition control plays an important role in it.Existing studies have found that inhibition and control ability is the key internal cause to reasonably respond to food craving.Compared with the losers,the successful dieters have stronger inhibition and control ability to food.For the adolescent group with heavy academic pressure(especially strong school students),some of them are more likely to relieve their learning pressure by increasing eating,or even overeating.Can the adolescent individuals with strong inhibition and control ability more effectively control their food intake? What is its performance in memory inhibition control and behavior inhibition control of food? These problems need further study.Therefore,this study takes adolescents as an example to explore the difference of inhibition control ability of different food craving levels.In this study,two experimental designs were used to explore whether there were differences in inhibition control ability(including memory inhibition control ability and behavior inhibition control ability)between strong food cravers and low food cravers.Memory inhibition was controlled by directed forgetting paradigm,and behavior inhibition was controlled by Go/No-go paradigm.In Experiment 1,30 senior strong school students were divided into groups according to the level of food craving.The directed forgetting paradigm was used for 2(picture type: food picture /neutral picture)× 2(food craving degree: strong food craving group / low food craving group)× 2(instruction: remember / forget)was designed to investigate the difference in memory inhibition control between strong food craving group and low food craving group.The results showed that:(1)the main effect of recall accuracy in strong food craving group and low food craving group was significant.The recall accuracy in strong food craving group was significantly stronger than that in low food craving group.The recall accuracy of strong food craving group and low food craving group had a significant main effect on instructions.The recall accuracy of TBR(requiring "remember" instructions)was significantly stronger than that of TBF(requiring "forget" instructions).strong food craving group and low food craving group have a significant main effect on the recall accuracy of picture types,and the recall accuracy of neutral pictures is significantly stronger than that of food pictures.(2)The recall accuracy of strong food craving group and low food craving group had significant interaction effect on group and instruction.Simple effect analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the recall accuracy of TBR and TBF items in the strong food craving group;For the low food craving group,the recall accuracy of TBR was significantly stronger than that of TBF,indicating that there was a directed forgetting effect.Under TBF,the recall accuracy of strong food craving group was significantly stronger than that of low food craving group,while under TBR,there was no significant difference between the recall accuracy of strong food craving group and low food craving group,indicating that the memory inhibition control ability of strong food craving group was weaker than that of low food craving group.The interaction effect between the strong food craving group and the low food craving group was significant in picture type and group.For neutral pictures,there was no significant difference between the strong food craving group and the low food craving group.For food pictures,the strong food craving group had significantly stronger recall accuracy than the low food craving group.(3)Under the clues of neutral pictures and food pictures,the directional forgetting scores of the strong food craving group were significantly lower than those of the low food craving group,which also showed that the memory inhibition control ability of the strong food craving group was weaker than that of the low food craving group.Experiment 2 was divided into two groups according to the level of food craving.After that,30 adolescents were selected from each group.The Go/No-go paradigm was used for Experiment 2(picture type: food picture / neutral picture)× 2(food craving degree: strong food craving group /low food craving group)a mixed experimental design was used to investigate the difference in behavior inhibition control ability between strong food craving group and low food craving group.The results showed that the average "no go" error rate of the strong food craving group was stronger than that of the low food craving group,but there was no significant difference between the strong food craving group and the low food craving group.Based on the above two experiments,this study draws the following conclusions: memory inhibition control can reduce the degree of food craving;The control ability of memory inhibition in strong food craving group was weaker than that in low food craving group.Suggestions: schools can strengthen the training of students’ inhibition and control ability to reasonably reduce the food craving level of overweight adolescents.