Food Image Study: Ambivalent motivation, attentional bias to threat, and thought shape fusion in restrained eaters

Background: Individuals who engage in restrained eating are often torn in a standoff between craving and dieting goals. This approach-avoidance conflict has been hypothesized to play a central role in the development of eating pathology. An emerging body of evidence suggests that one’s motivation to approach vs. avoid threat may modulate their attentional biases to threat. However, little is known about the link between ambivalent motivation towards food, visual attention to food, and eating pathology in restrained eaters.
Methods: We had restrained eaters complete a passive viewing task where their eye movements towards high calorie food images vs. neural objects were tracked. Participants also rated their motivation to look towards vs. away from food images.
Results: Participants who were ambivalent about whether to look towards or away from food images demonstrated a unique pattern of visual attention to food and reported greater thought-shape fusion and more restrained eating behaviours than other groups.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that some restrained eaters indeed experience ambivalent motivation towards high calorie food, which in turn modulates their attentional biases to food and contributes to cognitive distortions that are unique to eating pathology.

Based on Cisler and Koster (2010), Nelson et al. (2015), and Xu et al. (2021), we hypothesized that: (1) some restrained eaters would exhibit high motivation to both look towards and look away food images (that is, would be ambivalent); (2) motivation to look towards and look away from food images would influence visual attention such that the ambivalent group would show initial facilitated attention to food, followed by no maintenance of initial attention to food, and they would also look at food less than the engagers and more than the avoiders; and (3) relative to other groups, those who were ambivalent about whether to look towards or away from food images would exhibit greater thought-shape fusion and more negative affect at the end of the study.

Our results suggest that restrained eaters may vary in their motivation to approach vs. avoid images of high calorie food, and subsequently demonstrate different patterns of attentional biases to food. Individuals who were ambivalent about whether to look towards or away from food images reported more restrained eating behaviours and greater thought shape fusion. This study provides evidence to the critical role that approach-avoidance conflict may play in the development and maintenance of eating pathology (Stroebe, 2008; Werthmann et al., 2015). Ambivalent motivation to food may also be an important factor to address in treatment.