Episodic future thinking and grocery shopping online

Abstract

Grocery shopping shapes the home food environment, which can contribute to the development of obesity. Episodic future thinking (EFT) helps adults make healthier decisions by initiating prospective thinking, which guides one to forego smaller immediate rewards in favor of larger delayed rewards. EFT could help parents improve grocery purchases thereby improving the home food environment and family eating behaviors. The effect of EFT on food shopping was evaluated in two studies with mothers who were overweight/obese and primary household shoppers. In Study 1, 24 mothers were randomized to goal-directed process EFT versus a money saving control. In Study 2, 33 mothers were randomized to goal-directed process EFT, general EFT, or an episodic recent thinking (ERT) control. Following cue generation, participants completed a task where they purchased one week of groceries from an online store. Food purchases were analyzed for calories purchased per family member. In Study 1 the goal-directed process EFT group purchased fewer calories per person (F(1, 23) = 25.16, p < .001; η p 2 = .522). In Study 2 the goaldirected process EFT purchased fewer calories (F(1, 30) = 5.98, p = 0.02; η p 2 = .166) than the ERT control as did the EFT general group (F(1, 30) = 4.61, p = 0.04; η p 2 = .133). The two EFT groups did not differ from each other (F(1, 30) = 0.16, p = 0.69; η p 2 = .005). EFT may be an effective intervention when grocery shopping to reduce energy intake of foods purchased and could be a helpful component to a behavioral family-based obesity treatment program.Two in three adults and one in three children were obese in America in 2016 and that rate has been steadily increasing since 1999 (Skinner, Ravanbakht, Skelton, Perrin, & Armstrong, 2018). A major cause of obesity is a high intake of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods in tandem with a low intake of nutrient-rich foods (Dehghan, Akhtar-Danesh, & Merchant, 2005). Families that include children consume a majority of their calories from food that is purchased by parents, and mothers in particular tend to have greater control and influence over what their families consume when compared to other influences (Gibson et al.

Promoting farsighted decisions via episodic future thinking: A meta-analysis.

“…Content-specific EFT may particularly motivate far-sighted decisions by explicitly binding the delayed option to one's personal future goals (Boyer, 2008;Ernst et al, 2018). However, the few studies that have directly compared the influence of content-specific versus generic EFT have yielded inconclusive results (Dassen et al, 2016;Hollis-Hansen et al, 2019;O'Donnell et al, 2017). We here made use of the methodological variance in the literature to further examine this account across all included studies.…”

“…For example, exaggerated monetary DD has been associated with detrimental behaviors such as physical inactivity (Story et al, 2014), overeating (Appelhans et al, 2011;Rollins et al, 2010), and substance abuse (Bickel et al, 1999;Kollins, 2003;MacKillop et al, 2011). These behaviors implicitly constitute intertemporal choices between immediately available rewards (i.e., indulging in the moment) versus temporally protracted rewards (i.e., being in good health) (Bulley & Schacter, 2020;Epstein et al, 2003;Hollis-Hansen et al, 2019). DD thus generally characterizes choice impulsivity and may constitute a critical trans-disease process (Amlung et al, 2019;Hamilton et al, 2015).…”

Promoting farsighted decisions via episodic future thinking: A meta-analysis

“…Content-specific EFT may particularly motivate farsighted decisions by explicitly binding the delayed option to one's personal future goals (Boyer, 2008;Ernst et al, 2018). However, the few studies that have directly compared the influence of content-specific versus generic EFT have yielded inconclusive results (Dassen et al, 2016;Hollis-Hansen et al, 2019;O'Donnell et al, 2017). We here made use of the methodological variance in the literature to further examine this account across all included studies.…”

Improvements in episodic future thinking methodology: Establishing a standardized episodic thinking control

“…In an attempt to standardize the methods used in the study of EFT and to reduce the potential for the control procedure to evoke prospection, we tested a novel standardized episodic thinking (SET) group in a study of online grocery purchasing behavior [34]. We were concerned that the vivid imagining of one’s recent past (e.g.…”