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Implicit and explicit evaluations of foods: The natural and transformed dimension
Coricelli, Carol Foroni, Francesco Osimo, Sofia Adelaide Rumiati, Raffaella Ida
Coricelli, Carol
Foroni, Francesco
Osimo, Sofia Adelaide
Rumiati, Raffaella Ida
Abstract
In Western societies, choosing what to eat can be a demanding task due to the excessive availability of food. To make our feeding decisions more complex, our explicit and implicit evaluations of foods may differ as they are multi-attribute stimuli. Previous research has focused on investigating implicit and explicit evaluations towards high and low energy dense foods, the main finding being that participants’ hunger level and dietary habits (restrained eating) modulate such evaluations. In the present study, we investigated whether normal-weight healthy individuals assigned different values to natural and transformed foods depending on implicit (assessed with the Implicit Association Test) or explicit measures (assessed with explicit ratings), and whether participants’ hunger level or dietary habits modulated the responses at both levels. Our results showed that while for natural foods implicit and explicit measures (healthiness) seemed to converge, dietary habits or hunger level did not affect such evaluations. For transformed foods, a dissociation between implicit and explicit measures (healthiness) seemed to emerge, along with a strong modulation of dietary habits and hunger level on the evaluations of such foods. Thus, these findings reveal how the type of food can modulate evaluations at both the implicit and explicit level and highlight a critical role of long-term health consequences and eating patterns in food evaluations.
Keywords
food evaluation, implicit and explicit evaluation, IAT, eating behaviors, restraint scale
Date
2019
Type
Journal article
Journal
Food Quality and Preference
Book
Volume
73
Issue
Page Range
143-153
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Behavioural and Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
File Access
Controlled