TY  - THES
A1  - Höfling, Atilla
T1  - Beggars cannot be choosers - The influence of food deprivation on food related disgust
T1  - In der Not frisst der Teufel Fliegen - Der Einfluss von Nahrungsdeprivation auf nahrungsbezogenen Ekel
N2  - The main goals of the present thesis were to investigate how food deprivation influences food related disgust and to identify mental mechanisms that might underlie alterations in food related disgust. For this purpose, 9 studies were conducted that employed direct and indirect measures of attitudes, biological measures of affect as well as measures of real eating behavior and food choice, and compared responses of deprived and non deprived subjects on each of these measures. Spontaneous facial reactions were assessed via EMG and revealed that food deprived subjects showed weaker disgust reactions than satiated participants when being confronted with photographs of disgusting foods. Interestingly, deprived and non deprived subjects evaluated disgusting foods equally negative on a conscious level of information processing, indicating that food deprivation has the potential to attenuate food related disgust irrespective of conscious evaluations. Furthermore, it was found that food deprived participants readily consumed disgust related foods (“genetically modified foods”), while satiated participants rejected those foods. Again, no difference emerged between deprived and non deprived subjects in respect to their conscious evaluations of genetically modified foods (that were negative in both experimental groups). The dissociation between conscious evaluations and actual eating behavior that was observed amongst food deprived participants resembles the dissociation between conscious evaluations and facial reactions, thereby corroborating the assumption that alterations in food related disgust might directly influence eating behavior without changing conscious evaluations of foods. The assumption that a shift in automatic attitudes towards disgusting foods might be responsible for these effects received only partial support. That is, there was only a non significant tendency for food deprived subjects to evaluate disgusting foods more positive than satiated subjects on an automatic level of information processing. Instead, the results of the present thesis suggest that food deprived subjects exhibit a stronger motivation than satiated subjects to approach disgusting foods immediately. More precisely, food deprived participants exhibited strong approach motivational tendencies towards both, palatable and disgusting foods in an “Approach- Avoidance Task” whereas satiated participants only approached palatable (but not disgusting) foods on an automatic level of information processing. Moreover, food deprivation seems to change the subjective weighting of hedonic and functional food attributes in the context of more elaborated decisions about which foods to pick for consumption and which foods to reject. It was found that individual taste preferences were of minor importance for food deprived subjects but very important for satiated subjects when actually choosing between several food alternatives. In contrast, functional food attributes (e.g., immediate availability of a given food, large portion size) were more important selection criteria for food deprived subjects than for satiated subjects. Thus, food deprived participants were less picky than satiated participants, but showed a clear preference for those food alternatives that were functional in ending a state of food deprivation quickly – even if this meant choosing a food that was not considered tasty. Taken together, the present thesis shows that physiological need states (e.g., food deprivation) are tightly linked to the affective and motivational processing of need relevant cues. This link is so strong that food deprivation even modulates affective and motivational reactions as well as eating behavior and choice behavior towards disgusting (but need relevant) foods.
N2  - In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde untersucht, wie sich Nahrungsdeprivation auf nahrungsbezogene Ekelreaktionen auswirkt und welche mentalen Prozesse in diesem Zusammenhang eine Rolle spielen. Hierzu wurden in insgesamt 9 Studien unterschiedliche direkte und indirekte Einstellungsmaße, biologische Affektmaße (z.B. EMG), sowie tatsächliches Ess- und Nahrungsauswahlverhalten von hungrigen und satten Probanden analysiert. Anhand elektromyographisch abgeleiteteter, fazialer Reaktionen wurde nachgewiesen, dass hungrige Probanden schwächere unmittelbare Ekelreaktionen als satte Probenden zeigen, während sie mit Fotos von ekelerregenden Speisen konfrontiert werden. Interessanterweise trat dieser Effekt auf, obwohl hungrige Probanden eklige Speisen auf einer bewussten Ebene der Informationsverarbeitung genau so negativ beurteilten wie satte Probanden auch. Dies legt nahe, dass Nahrungsdeprivation auch unabhängig von bewussten Bewertungen zu einer unmittelbaren Abnahme nahrungsbezogener Ekelreaktionen führen kann. Darüber hinaus wurde gefunden, dass satte Probanden den Konsum von ekelassoziierten Speisen („Genfood“) verweigerten, während hungrige Probanden diese in uneingeschränktem Ausmaß konsumierten. Interessanterweise beurteilten hungrige Probanden genetisch veränderte Lebensmittel auf bewusster Ebene jedoch genau so negativ wie satte Probanden auch. Die Hypothese, dass die beobachteten Effekte auf eine Modulation automatischer bzw. „unbewusster“ Einstellungen gegenüber ekligen Speisen zurück zu führen ist, wurde nur bedingt bestätigt. So zeigten hungrige Probanden zwar sowohl gegenüber appetitlichen, als auch gegenüber ekligen Speisen positivere automatische Bewertungen als satte Probanden, dieser Unterschied verfehlte jedoch knapp statistische Signifikanz. Vielmehr legen die gefundenen Ergebnisse nahe, dass hungrige Probanden vor allem stärkere unmittelbare Annäherungsreaktionen an eklige Speisen zeigen als satte Probanden. Letztere differenzierten im Rahmen einer sog. „Annäherungs- Vermeidungsaufgabe“ auch auf einer automatischen Ebene der Informationsverarbeitung deutlich zwischen appetitlicher und ekliger Nahrung, während hungrige Probanden sich gleichermaßen stark an appetitliche und unappetitliche Speisen annäherten. Darüber hinaus zeigte sich, dass hedonische Aspekte (z.B. individuelle Geschmacksvorlieben) unwichtigere Kriterien für die Nahrungsauswahl von hungrigen Probanden waren, als für die Nahrungsauswahl satter Probanden. Funktionale Nahrungsattribute (z.B. Portionsgröße, unmittelbare zeitliche Verfügbarkeit) hingegen waren wichtigere Auswahlkriterien für hungrige Probanden als für satte Probanden. Hungrige Probanden waren somit weniger „wählerisch“ als satte Probanden, sondern zeigten eine Präferenz für jene Nahrungsalternativen, die dazu geeignet waren, einen physiologischen Deprivationszustand schnell zu beenden – selbst wenn es sich dabei um geschmacklich unattraktive Speisen handelte. Insgesamt zeigt die vorliegende Arbeit auf, dass physiologische Deprivationszustände wie Nahrungsdeprivation eng mit der affektiven und motivationalen Verarbeitung von bedürfnisrelevanten Reizen verknüpft sind. Diese Verknüpfung ist so eng, dass Nahrungsdeprivation sogar unmittelbare affektive und motivationale Reaktionen, sowie Konsum.- und Auswahlverhalten gegenüber Speisen beeinflusst, die wir normalerweise als eklig oder unappetitlich erachten.
KW  - Ekel
KW  - Hunger
KW  - Nahrung
KW  - Nahrungsdeprivation
KW  - Essverhalten
KW  - Affekt
KW  - Motivation
KW  - Reflektiv Impulsiv Modell (RIM)
KW  - food deprivation
KW  - eating behavior
KW  - affect
KW  - motivation
KW  - Reflective Impulsive Model (RIM)
Y1  - 2008
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-34609
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Topolinski, Sascha
A1  - Strack, Fritz
T1  - Corrugator activity confirms immediate negative affect in surprise
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - The emotion of surprise entails a complex of immediate responses, such as cognitive interruption, attention allocation to, and more systematic processing of the surprising stimulus. All these processes serve the ultimate function to increase processing depth and thus cognitively master the surprising stimulus. The present account introduces phasic negative affect as the underlying mechanism responsible for this switch in operating mode. Surprising stimuli are schema discrepant and thus entail cognitive disfluency, which elicits immediate negative affect. This affect in turn works like a phasic cognitive tuning switching the current processing mode from more automatic and heuristic to more systematic and reflective processing. Directly testing the initial elicitation of negative affect by surprising events, the present experiment presented high and low surprising neutral trivia statements to N = 28 participants while assessing their spontaneous facial expressions via facial electromyography. High compared to low surprising trivia elicited higher corrugator activity, indicative of negative affect and mental effort, while leaving zygomaticus (positive affect) and frontalis (cultural surprise expression) activity unaffected. Future research shall investigate the mediating role of negative affect in eliciting surprise-related outcomes.
KW  - phasic affective modulation
KW  - processing fluency
KW  - intuition
KW  - surprise
KW  - EMG
KW  - elevator EMG activity
KW  - facial expressions
KW  - semantic coherence
KW  - emotion
KW  - judgments
KW  - attention
KW  - memory
KW  - affect
KW  - expectancy
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-144068
VL  - 6
IS  - 134
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Madan, Christopher R.
A1  - Bayer, Janine
A1  - Gamer, Matthias
A1  - Lonsdorf, Tina B.
A1  - Sommer, Tobias
T1  - Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term ‘visual complexity.’ Visual complexity can be described as, “a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components.” Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an ‘arousal-complexity bias’ to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli.
KW  - visual complexity
KW  - affect
KW  - arousal
KW  - valence
KW  - eyetracking
KW  - emotion
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-190015
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 8
IS  - 2368
ER  -