Abstract
Background: Dietary restraint has been linked to deficits in the ability to recall detailed memories of personally experienced events (referred to as autobiographical memory specificity). As priming with healthy foods increases the salience of restraint it would be expected to lead to greater deficits in memory specificity. Objective: To determine if priming word cues with images of healthy or unhealthy foods would influence the specificity of memory retrieval, and if deficits in memory specificity would be more evident in those reporting higher levels of dietary restraint, or currently dieting. Methods: Sixty female undergraduates self-reported if they were currently dieting and completed measures of mood, restraint, and disinhibition, and a modified version of the autobiographical memory task. Participants were presented with positive and negative words (unrelated to eating concerns) and asked to retrieve a specific memory in response to each cue. A food image was shown prior to each word cue; half of the participants were primed with images of healthy foods and half with images of unhealthy foods. Results: As expected, participants primed with healthy foods retrieved fewer specific memories than did those primed with unhealthy foods. However, neither restraint nor current dieting behaviour was associated with memory specificity. Conclusions: Differences in memory specificity between the priming conditions cannot be explained in terms of increased salience of restraint. However, it is plausible that unhealthy images led to an increase in positive affect, which in turn improved memory specificity. Level of evidence: Level I: Evidence obtained from: at least one properly designed experimental study.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 53 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Eating and Weight Disorders - Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 21 Jun 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 21 Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2023, the Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Keywords
- Memory-specificity
- Dieting
- Restraint
- Positive affect
- Priming