On-site PhD conferral Sarah Kochs

Keywords: mindset, dietary restraint, brain responses, attention bias

"Focus On Food: Effects of Mindset, Hunger and Dietary Restraint on Attention Bias, Food Intake and Brain Responses to Food" 

Today, many people struggle with their bodyweight and repeatedly go on diets, they exert dietary restraint, but are unsuccessful at maintaining long-term weight loss. A popular idea in the scientific literature is that dietary failures are due to increased attractiveness of high-caloric tasty foods, as reflected in increased attention for these foods and increased activity in the reward centre of the brain. Empirical evidence for these ideas is highly inconsistent though.

Much research has overlooked an important factor: Mindset. In most research, it was simply assumed that high-caloric tasty food would always be appealing. However, people’s mindset may fluctuate between enjoyment and health focus, viewing for example a piece of chocolate as something to enjoy or as a threat to one’s waistline.

The current thesis investigated effects of mindset, hunger and dietary restraint on brain responses to food, attention bias for food and food intake. This research showed that tasty and high-caloric food do not elicit a stronger response in the reward centres of the brain than do not-tasty and low-caloric foods. Instead, mindset determined the level of response in this brain system, independent of the level of dietary restraint. Food tastiness and caloric content were coded in multivoxel patterns of brain activity, also independent of the level of dietary restraint.

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Language: English