Who likes it more? Restrained eaters’ implicit attitudes towards food

Previous work has been unclear as to how restrained eating is related to implicit attitudes towards food. The present paper introduces a new variant of the affective priming paradigm to measure implicit attitudes towards food among restrained and unrestrained eaters, using food pictures as primes and emoticons as targets. Results of two studies show that while unrestrained eaters evaluate palatable foods more positively than neutral and unpalatable foods, restrained eaters do not. In addition, it is shown that restrained eaters have stronger evaluations of the negative aspects of palatable food, and this influences their food attitudes. Thus, the present findings suggest that restrained eaters’ chronic goal of dieting impacts their implicit attitude towards food items via their perception of the negative aspects of palatable food. These results are discussed with regard to the role of attitudes in the regulation of eating behavior.