The Color Nutrition Information Paradox: Effects of Suggested Sugar Content on Food Cue Reactivity in Healthy Young Women

Abstract

Color nutrition information (CNI) based on a traffic light system conveys information about food quality with a glance. The color red typically indicates detrimental food characteristics (e.g., very high sugar content) and aims at inhibiting food shopping and consumption. Red may, however, also elicit cross-modal associations with sweet taste, which is a preferable food characteristic. We conducted two experiments. An eye-tracking study investigated whether CNI has an effect on cue reactivity (dwell time, saccadic latency, wanting/liking) for sweet foods. The participants were presented with images depicting sweets (e.g., cake). Each image was preceded by a colored circle that informed about the sugar content of the food (red = high, green = low, gray = unknown). It was tested whether the red circle would help the participants to direct their gaze away from the ‘high sugar’ item. A second experiment investigated whether colored prime circles (red, green, gray) without nutrition information would influence the assumed sweetness of a food. In Experiment 1, CNI had the opposite of the intended effect. Dwell time and saccadic latency were higher for food items preceded by a red compared to a green circle. This unintended response was positively associated with participants’ liking of sweet foods. CNI did not change the wanting/liking of the displayed foods. In Experiment 2, we found no evidence for color priming on the assumed sweetness of food. Our results question whether CNI is helpful to influence initial cue reactivity toward sweet foods.

“Expert persuasion” can decrease willingness to pay for sugar-containing food

“…In contrast, Drugova et al (17) showed that people are willing to pay less for products labeled as sugar-free. On the other hand, some of the reduced-sugar labels that have been tested in the past, have revealed null effects (18)(19)(20). Importantly, in most of these experiments the sugar-related labels were displayed together with additional labels or claims raising concerns about whether the observed effects are confounded by information not related to sugar.…”

The influence of congruency proportion, target eccentricity, and valence strength on the spatial-valence metaphoric congruency effect in a word valence judgment task

“…Due to coronavirus outbreak in Hong Kong (January–March 2020), we were not able to conduct this experiment in our laboratory. Instead, we programmed this experiment using PsychoPy 3.2.4 (Peirce, Gray, Simpson et al 2019 , see also Anwyl-Irvine, Dalmaijer, Hodges, & Evershed 2020 ; Bridges, Pitiot, MacAskill, & Pierce 2020 ), which was used in previous online experiments (e.g., Gallant 2020 ; Potthoff, La Face, & Schienle 2020 ), and ran the experiment in an online platform (Pavlovia). The design and procedure were highly similar to those in Experiment 1’s equal congruency proportion condition except that 192 participants were recruited (mean age 20.29, SD 2.32, 138 female), the number of observation was 96 per condition (i.e., including both experimental and “filler” trials in the analyses) and the instruction did not state any information about congruency or the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., the same instruction as in Experiments 2 and 3 and our previous works, e.g., Huang et al 2014 ).…”

Construal-level priming does not modulate memory performance in Deese-Roediger/McDermott paradigm

“…However, due to coronavirus outbreak in Hong Kong (January-April 2020), we were not able to conduct this experiment in our laboratory, as what we did for Experiments 1 and 2. Instead, we programmed this experiment using PsychoPy 3.2.4 (Peirce et al, 2019, see also Anwyl-Irvine et al, 2020, and Bridges et al, 2020, which was used in previous online experiments (e.g., Potthoff et al, 2020;Tse et al, in press), and ran the experiment in an online platform (Pavlovia). Hence, participants typed their responses in the writing task and free recall task, contrary to the paper-and-pencil responses used for the free recall task in Experiments 1 and 2.…”