Eating Behaviour Flashcards
Brown and Ogden
Reported consistent correlations between parents and their children in terms of their snaking habits, eating motivations and attitudes towards healthy eating/dieting/body image.
Macintyre
Pointed out that people might not necessarily be able to carry out what they hear from the media, due to cultural differences/income/social class/availability of food, it’s not therefore a simple choice of lifestyle.
Ball and Kennedy
Found supporting evidence for the ‘acculturation effect’. Studied 14,000 women between 18-23 years in Australia. Those who had spent the longest time in Australia reported similar eating behaviours to women who were born in Australia.
Garg (comfort-eating)
Offered 38 pps. popcorn or grapes during a film they were watching. Depending on whether they were watching the happy or the sad film, altered their choice. Those watching the sad film, consumed 36% more popcorn than the upbeat film group. Garg suggested that this was because they wanted to give themselves a rush of euphoria to lift their mood.
Garg (effect of media)
Gave the pps. information of the calories in popcorn, and as a result found that less popcorn was eaten in both situations.
Parker
Found that while comfort foods may alleviate a depressed mood, for other it may just prolong it, especially if used repeatedly. (unhealthy aspect leaves them feeling worse about themselves?)
Psychodynamic approach for AN…
Could be due to over-gratification or under-gratification which leads an individual to want to regress back to a younger age when they had less responsibility and stress, and therefore regress back to the pre-ego stage.
Freud
Young females may want to prevent growing up, and so starve themselves to avoid becoming fat (associated with pregnancy). Symptom=amenorrhoea. Periods/fertility then stop- face validity, seems related.
Minuchin
Put forward the family systems theory. Suggests that anorexic’s families are “enmeshed”, which means that the parents are emotionally over involved in the child’s life, which can lead to long, ongoing conflicts within the family, which are never addressed. As a result it projects anxiety onto the ‘ill’ child. AN becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety.
Bruch
Overprotective or controlling mothers can lead the child to engage in a struggle for autonomy. Only way of gaining independence= over what they eat. (common in middle class families- expectations are high.) Could be linked with personality types of anorexics. (obsessive personalities)
Blos (a psychodynamic theorist)
proposed that adolescence is a time of re-individuation- therefore AN is a way of trying to gain control.
The three main forms of dieting…
- restricting the amount of food eaten. 2. restraining from certain foods. 3. avoiding eating for long periods of time.
Herman and Mack’s restraint theory
Suggests that attempting not to eat, actually increases the probability of over-eating.
Wardle and Beales
Randomly assigned 27 obese women to either, a diet group, an exercise group or a non-treatment group for 7 weeks. At week 4, food intake was assessed before and after a ‘preload’ snack. At week 6 food intake was measured in stressful conditions. Results showed that in both assessments, women in the diet condition ate more than the women in the other 2 groups.
Herman and Polivy (‘boundary model’)
Psychological factors are involved. Once they break their boundaries they no longer feel the need to restrain.
Ogden
If individuals fail to carry out the restraint diet, they may end up feeling depressed. Overeating = coping with the failure. Overeating becomes a consequence of obesity.
