Does immersion or detachment facilitate healthy eating? Comparing the effects of sensory imagery and mindful decentering on attitudes and behavior towards healthy and unhealthy food

Abstract

Many people would like to reduce indulging in unhealthy foods, but find it difficult to do so. Previous research shows that individuals eat smaller portions of unhealthy hedonic food if they first imagine the sensory properties of tempting food (sensory imagery; Cornil & Chandon, 2016). Similarly, they show less preference for such food if they think about food in a detached way (decentering; Papies, Barsalou, & Custers, 2012; Papies, Pronk, Keesman, & Barsalou, 2015). Given that these two mindsets are seemingly at odds with each other, we compared them across two studies to examine their effects on the preference for (Experiment 1) and consumption of (Experiment 2) hedonic healthy and unhealthy food. Although sensory imagery and decentering had largely different effects for preferences towards healthy and unhealthy foods, they had comparable effects on the consumption of both types of foods, serving to reduce the effects of consumption in participants affected by hunger and emotional eating. These results suggest that while sensory imagery and decentering are based on different mechanisms, they produce similar results when it comes to the consumption of hedonic food, regardless of how healthy the food is.

Pleasure or Health? The Role of Mental Simulation in Desire and Food Choices

“…Considering the increasing obesity prevalence and a constant tempting environment, our aim is to investigate how mental simulation can promote the choice of virtue foods. The role of mental simulations in healthier behavior has gained interest in the past years, and indeed, a considerable amount of literature has been published on how eating simulations affect behavior [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. However, the majority of the studies have only used or evoked consumption simulations (process simulations) but the use of post-consumption simulations (outcome simulations), especially in combination with virtue foods, has been poorly studied.…”

Food consumption values and the influence of physical activity

“…These results contradict those presented by Kang et al (2015), where, if healthy foods are tasty and delicious, consumers are likely to be attracted to this food dimension, thus leading to positive emotions such as pleasure and excitement. Several studies (Barauskaite et al , 2018; Chang et al , 2018; Kang et al , 2015) mention the existence of a link between expectations and the likelihood of healthy food consumption considering a hedonic relationship. This confirms H3 for the three different food dimensions.…”

“…Food consumption has received significant scholar attention (Defago et al , 2020; Donati Zeppa et al , 2020; Goetzke et al , 2014; Hur and Jang, 2015; Joseph et al , 2011; Kergoat et al , 2020; Wang, 2019), these studies ranging from sensory characteristics to the amount ingested (Chang et al , 2018; Cox et al , 2018; Werle et al , 2019) and its impacts on obesity and mental health (Crovetto et al , 2018; Meegan et al , 2017; Wattick et al , 2018). Thus, there is an emphasis on consumers' buying behaviour and perspectives on food, especially healthy ones (Barauskaite et al , 2018; Cheval et al , 2017; Ditlevsen et al , 2019; Martinez et al , 2018; Sim and Cheon, 2019).…”

Mindful eating: what we know so far

“…Decentering from thoughts and reactions to food images Chang et al (2018) used a decentering exercise where they asked participants to consider the character of their thoughts and reactions to a series of food images and to imagine these were constructions of the mind that appear and disappear. They compared this with a sensory exercise (where participants were asked to imagine the taste, smell and mouth texture of each food) and a control condition (where participants were simply asked to view the images in a relaxed manner).…”