Poster #24 - Autonomy Support Improves Appetitive Self-Regulation

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

The ability to regulate appetitive urges, such as food cravings, promotes healthy development during late adolescence. By reinterpreting a stimulus to decrease its affective meaning, cognitive reappraisal is a self-regulation strategy that can be used to decrease appetitive urges. Previous work has primarily examined reappraisal when participants are explicitly instructed when to regulate their reactions to stimuli, overlooking autonomous, self-initiated reappraisal. This process, however, may track more closely with regulation ability in real-world contexts and may be particularly important in college, as regulatory scaffolding is sharply reduced. To investigate the effect of autonomy on reappraisal ability, we designed a novel reappraisal task in which college students (N = 67) reappraised their desire for personally-craved foods under varying levels of autonomy support.
In the reappraisal task, participants saw pictures of personally-craved foods and either actively viewed images (“look” condition) or focused on the negative health consequences associated with consumption (“regulate” condition). To support autonomy, participants chose whether they wanted to look or regulate (“yes choice” condition) on 60% of the trials, whereas they were instructed what to do on the remaining 40% (“no choice” condition). On each trial, participants rated their current desire to eat the food in the image they just saw. We hypothesized that 1) craving ratings would be attenuated when participants reappraised their desire, and 2) this attenuation would be greater in the choice condition.
To further promote autonomy, we randomly assigned participants to one of two experimental conditions and tested whether increasing the salience of autonomy potentiated task effects. Whereas participants in the control condition simply completed the craving reappraisal task, participants in the experimental condition completed an additional writing exercise about the value of choice. Specifically, they read a paragraph about the critical role choice plays in shaping identity and then wrote about a specific choice they made that illustrates taking ownership of their life. We hypothesized that this experimental manipulation would improve regulation ability on choice trials.
To test these hypotheses, we used linear mixed effects modeling. In line with our predictions, reappraisal decreased craving ratings and choice moderated these effects, such that choosing to regulate resulted in greater reappraisal success. However, the moderating effect of choice was only present in the experimental condition (see Figure 1). These results imply that merely supporting autonomy through choice may not be enough to improve reappraisal ability. Instead, perceiving choice as relevant and valuable appears to be a prerequisite for improved regulation. These results are significant because they suggest that supporting autonomy can improve appetitive self-regulation and this knowledge could be used to help develop effective interventions to promote health and well-being on college campuses.

Authors

• Garrett Ross, Student
  Presenting Author

• Danielle Cosme, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Arian Mobasser, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elliot Berkman, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Pfeifer, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author