اثر انگیختگی افکار در مورد کنترل بر اضطراب و مواد غذایی دریافتی توسط خویشتن داری غذایی تعدیل می شود

The study was designed to examine: (a) if activating thoughts about control affects anxiety and food intake and (b) if those effects are moderated by dietary restraint. Eighty female undergraduates were administered the Dietary Restraint questionnaire and were primed for cognitions of control or of lack of control. The participants' perceptions of control over food consumption, their state anxiety, and their food intake as part of an alleged taste-test, were assessed. As evidence for the effectiveness of priming, participants reported less control over food consumption after being primed for lack of control than for control cognitions. As expected, Restraint score was negatively correlated with perceived control over food consumption. Consistent with hypothesis, participants high in dietary restraint experienced greater anxiety after being primed for control than after priming for lack of control, whereas participants low in dietary restraint displayed the opposite pattern. These findings were consistent with the cognitive dissonance principle that individuals experience greater anxiety when cognitions are inconsistent with personal beliefs than when they are consistent. As expected, priming thoughts of lack of control resulted in greater food intake than did priming thoughts of control, supporting the hypothesis of a nonconscious, automatic link between cognitions and food intake.

Various theories on eating problems advance the principle that individuals' perceptions of control over food consumption serve as implicit cognitive schemas that affect food intake (Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996, Grillo and Shiffman, 1994 and Herman and Polivy, 1975; Westenhoefer, Broeckmann, & Volker, 1994). In this paper, food intake is used to refer to the quantity of food consumed. Studies only have yielded an association between perceptions of control over food consumption and food intake and, consequently, provide only limited evidence for the causal relation between them. Furthermore, previous research has not revealed whether control cognitions serve as a nonconscious automatic cause of food intake. The primary purpose of the present study was to utilize priming of control cognitions in order to examine that causal relation. In addition, the study was designed to examine whether dietary restraint was negatively associated with perceived control over food consumption and, consequently, would moderate the effects of the priming control cognitions as evidenced in patterns of anxiety.