For the majority of people, diet or food selection is the most significant controllable factor that affects their health. That is, certain diets (e.g., high in fat and cholesterol) contribute to numerous health problems (e.g., cardiovascular diseases, obesity, cancer), whereas other diets help prevent or ameliorate diseases (e.g., cancer, diabetes, hypertension). Despite these important health consequences, relatively little is known about the mechanisms that guide food selection. The proposed research will investigate whether attitudes can provide a theoretical framework for examining food selection. An initial experiment revealed that people?s attitudes toward food are more positive when they are hungry than when they are not hungry.
The aim of the first experiment is to replicate and extend these initial findings by investigating how hunger influences attitudes toward foods with different macronutrient compositions and calorie contents. A second experiment will examine how beliefs about when foods should be eaten (e.g., breakfast, dinner) interact with hunger to influence food attitudes. Another experiment will use event-related brain potentials and self-reports to explore whether hunger influences the evaluative perceptions of foods and/or the evaluative responses to foods. Scientific progress on food selection has been limited because there has been no theoretical framework for integrating the different types of information that determine food preferences (e.g., taste, smell, texture, social and cultural beliefs); the purpose of a fourth experiment is to develop and validate a scale for assessing these different types of information. A final experiment will investigate the way in which hunger influences food attitudes. For example, food attitudes may become more positive when people are hungry because the taste becomes more positive or because negative beliefs about some foods (e.g., that they are unhealthy) become less salient. All of the experiments will investigate whether individual differences such as obesity influence the relation between hunger and food attitudes. In conclusion, the proposed research should provide valuable insights into how hunger influences food attitudes and thus should have important implications for health problems that are related to food selection.
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