The Use of Instrumental Emotions in Implementation Intentions and Changing Eating Behaviors

This paper addresses the conscious, deliberate recruitment and use of emotions in regulating food intake. We hypothesized that greater use of negative, avoidance-based instrumental emotions would be associated with greater success in eliminating a food from one’s diet, and we tested that association naturalistically and experimentally. In the first study, we predicted that greater use of those negative, avoidance-based emotion strategies in regulating food intake would be naturalistically associated with greater success in reducing intake. Individuals used fear and disgust more often in successful elimination of a food relative to unsuccessful elimination, but those emotions were not predictive of success when the goal was moderating intake. In the second study, we tested experimentally the prediction that inducing negative, avoidance-based emotional associations with a specific food would reduce intake over positive emotions or non-emotion-based planning. Participants who included emotional states, either positive or negative, in their implementation intentions, did not significantly differ in their reduction of intake of their target food over the course of a week. While the first study did demonstrate the hypothesized relationship between use of negative, avoidance-based emotions and reduced intake, the second study did not provide the predicted experimental support to demonstrate a causal relationship between the emotion states and intake.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Volz, Sarah

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/90725

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/90725