Impulsive Eating

Most of us have heard and believe that impulsive eating contributes mightily to poor food choices, but that commonsense belief has suffered from a relative absence of careful psychological research.  To remedy the deficiency, Harm Veling and his colleagues (2017) took on the challenge in a series of five experiments.  The tedious details of the five need not occupy us here.  Rather, let’s focus on the experiments’ basic formats and their essential conclusions.

First, the researchers demonstrated that experimental conditions can be created to mimic food choices in the natural environment.  Having established that proof, they determined the subjects’ healthful and unhealthful food preferences.  Subsequently, experimental conditions were manipulated to induce particular food choices.  As anticipated, the participants did make the food choices to which they had been conditioned within the experiment.  However, that induced selection only occurred under time pressure; that is, when the selection needed to be made impulsively.  If the participants were given time to select, were instructed to think carefully about their choices, or needed to carefully attend to their available choices, they made their usual food selections, rather than the choices for which they had been conditioned.

Harm Veling’s subjects were nutrition savvy enough to discriminate the more nutritionally healthful from the less nutritionally healthful foods presented to them during the experiment.  However, in everyday life, sometimes correct food choices are far from obvious.  The food industry spends millions trying to nudge and/or deceive you toward the most profitable products with little or no attention to their health implications.  And, as I am sure you know, most advertising money is spent on foodstuffs that you would prefer to avoid.  If most people wanted the non-healthful foods, very little if any ads would be devoted to them.   

Lesson one from the Veling et al. study then, is to know what is good, better, best, and bad, worse, worst to eat.  To do so, you must take the time and expend the effort to educate yourself accordingly.  Second, try strenuously to make deliberate, rather than impulsive food choices.  Third, since we all eat impulsively at times, know the conditions that do prompt your impulsive eating and avoid them to the extent possible.  Third, give yourself time to select what you want to eat.  Even if you find yourself in a situation that encourages impulsive eating, decide which food choices are better than others.  Fourth, cue yourself to think about the choices.  That could amount literally to saying aloud, “Which of these available foods are best for me?”  Fifth, pay attention to all that transpires; that means, you must pay attention to what you are thinking, feeling, and doing, and what the environment is suggesting to you.  For instance, food presentation can seduce you into eating what looks the best, instead of what is the best.  Finally, and most important: condition yourself to pay proper attention to what you eat and how you eat it.  Conditioning also takes time and effort.  You must start now and continue relentlessly.  Eventually, your default food choices will become much more healthful than they are presently.

Reference

Veling, Harm; Chen, Zhang; Tombrock, Merel C.; Verpaalen, Iris A. M.; Schmitz, & Laura I.; Dijksterhuis, Ap; Holland, Rob W.  Training Impulsive Choices for Healthy and Sustainable Food.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, February 2, No Pagination Specified.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xap0000112

Remembering to Behave Healthfully

We often intend to implement a healthful lifestyle behavior.  But following through is not always easy.  The complexities of life often intervene to distract or dissuade us from doing what we had intended.  Accordingly, psychologists have worked to discover what we can do to transform current intentions into future actions.  Rebekah E. Smith, Reed R. Hunt, and Amy E. Murray are three investigators who addressed the issue.  They specifically looked at the interactions among attention, memory, and adequate task completion.

Smith and her colleagues wondered how a future behavioral intention affects execution of an ongoing task and vice versa.  For instance, if the idea to call to schedule an annual physical exam occurs while one is completing an income tax return, he must continue to accurately calculate his taxes, register the intention to call for the exam, and later remember actually to make the call.  In short, there is considerable competition for his attention and action that will determine what gets done and how well.

Contextual issues proved to be important.  When the context of the ongoing activity (e.g., doing the taxes) supplied cues to the intended event (making an exam appointment), interference to the ongoing activity was minimal.  Conversely, when the context of the ongoing activity lacked cues to the intended event, interference was substantial.  The most important contextual cues occurred at points of transition during the ongoing activity.  In our example, after completing the income portion of his tax return and preparing to calculate medical expenses, one is more likely to remember to  make the exam call than when in the midst of doing either the income or expense portion.  Understandably, that reallocation of attention and action from tax completion to telephone calling comes at a  cost to the previously ongoing tax completion task.  Of course when one resumes the taxes, the task will require more attention and effort than if there had been no disruption to doing the taxes.

Since an ongoing activity usually consumes considerable attention, the Smith, Hunt, and Murray study underscored how important it is to anticipate when one must employ attention in order to achieve a desired goal.  The more that context promotes attention deployment, the better.  

To implement a healthful lifestyle change then, you must decide clearly what needs to be done. Second, you should imagine when the behavior will be executed..  Third, consider what usual ongoing behaviors are likely to interfere with your ability to remember the healthful lifestyle change at that time.  Fourth, plan how to fashion context relevant cues at a transition point in the ongoing task that actually enhances your ability to remember to implement your good intention.  And finally, ensure that you act expeditiously to execute the healthful behavior as soon as the context cue presents itself.

Reference:

Smith, R., Hunt, R., & Murray, A. (2017).  Prospective memory in context: Moving through a familiar space.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43,2,

189-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000303.

Not Knowing What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

The 21st Century is the century of information.  More facts and figures are readily available to more people than ever before, and what is not known usually can be discovered, if one is determined to search assiduously for it.  Although everything said in this blog so far is obvious to virtually everyone, the implications may not be.

Because information is so cheap, we have developed an extraordinarily inflated notion of what we understand.  However, having access to information is not equivalent to understanding.  More important, as we shall see, not knowing what we don’t know can hurt us.

Although knowing many things superficially is readily achieved, superficial knowledge most often is of minimal usefulness.  Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil pioneered study of the concept which they  called, “the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED).”  As the phrase implies, those under the influence of IOED think that they have a much more sophisticated understanding of phenomena than is the case.

Rozenblit and Keil (2002) initiated IOED studies simply, by asking subjects to rate how well they thought they understood how common, everyday items work, such as refrigerators.  Next, the subjects were required to write a detailed explanation of the workings of the items.  Finally, the participants complied with the direction to reconsider and then to re-rate their understanding of the workings.  Not surprisingly, the re-ratings of their understanding proved significantly lower than had been their initial ratings.  Presumably, by the study’s end, the subjects had a much greater appreciation for what they did not know.  For sure, they knew that they should call an appliance repair person rather than attempting to fix a radically ruined refrigerator.

Follow-up studies have shown that the IOED applies to much more than appliances and other common items; it also is relevant to a wide range of phenomena that are abstract rather than concrete, including ethics and politics (https://meaningness.com/understanding).

The major issue, as I see it, is that we all harbor an inherent casualness about what we believe we know.  We briefly consider some item or issue when the spirit moves us, and devote just enough energy to  it to enable us to set it aside as though it has been mastered.  That tendency frequently is of no import because we usually can find an expert to adequately deal with the item or issue when necessary.  You can enlist your refrigerator repair person or senator to resolve food cooling or legislative challenges, resectively.

Some things, however, are best handled by you—most notably lifestyle practices that determine your physical and mental health.  Your IOED can cause you to seize upon a simplistic solution to correct problems with your body or mind when, in fact, you need much deeper processing to cope with them.

It was my concern about facile solutions to complex problems that led me to enumerate and explain sixteen change implementation strategies that you should review when you plan a healthful lifestyle modification.  I, myself, had to resist the IOED advice of editors and publishers to limit what I recommended to seven suggestions, as had been made the industry norm by such best sellers  as Stephen R. Covey's book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I managed to resist because I understand and have experienced with patients over 40 years that every individual is unique and that they succeed over time only when they  implement plans that adjust for their uniqueness.  I knew by direct experience the pitfalls inherent in communicating according to limitations imposed by a state of the art IOED mental set.  Don't be duped into believing that there are "seven simple steps" to achieving anything.  

References

Rozenblit, L., and  Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26, 521-562.

The illusion of understanding.   (https://meaningness.com/understanding).

Sleeping Your Way to a Loving Marriage

The way that spouses evaluate their relationship is critically important for their individual and conjoint well-being.  Most of us have heard about the concept “cognitive dissonance,” meaning a discrepancy between one’s standard belief and her behavior.  For instance, if a wife believes that she loves her husband, but frequently launches into tirades against him, she must resolve the obvious discontinuity between her belief and her overt behavior.  Cognitive dissonance has a counterpart, “cognitive consonance,”  meaning behavior that is consistent with belief.  For instance, the wife of our example would express cognitive consonance by acknowledging the reality of her frequent tirades and deciding that she must not love her husband as much as she thinks she does.

A spouse's rating of her/his marriage influences the quality of the marriage.  Accordingly, a consistently positive marital relationship rating facilitates marital contentment via cognitive consonance.  Understandably then, psychologists seek to understand and encourage whatever promotes positive ratings.

Heather M. Maranges and James K. McNulty (2017) looked at the affect of self-regulation on marital relationship rating, meaning how an individual’s personal emotion management influences the way they evaluate their marriage.  More specifically, the psychologists chose to limit their investigation to how sleep, as a means of self-regulation, contributes to marital satisfaction.  They wondered if a spouse would rate their partner less highly when the rating spouse was sleep deprived, and more highly when the rating spouse was sleep satisfied.

The study recruited 68 newly wed couples, defined as a couple married less than 6 months.  They averaged 24 years-of-age and 14 couples had children.  The investigators required each member of the couple for seven days to keep diaries independently to record their daily experiences, the number of hours slept per night, and their overall daily marital satisfaction.

As expected, marital satisfaction was higher on good sleep days.  And about 33 percent of the subjects indicated that they were aware that poor sleep caused marital discontent. Similarly, stress was higher when sleep was impaired.  In general, women were less compromised during days after poor sleep than were men.  Maranges and McNulty speculated that the women might have been inherently better stress regulators.

Nothing especially startling about these results.  However, they do underscore the interrelationships among lifestyle, the body, human interaction, and life satisfaction.  My point is to encourage you to think about all four of the interacting dimensions not just regarding sleep, but for all areas of your physical and mental health.  Whenever you are stressed or your energy is otherwise depleted, your are less capable in body and mind, and less appealing as an interpersonal partner.

Reference:

Maranges, Heather M. and  McNulty, James K. (2016).  Journal of Family Psychology, July.  No Pagination Specified.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/fam0000225