Deliciously healthy:

Healthy food cues elicit approach motivation and reduce breadth of attention

I will present results of my research on the influence of appetitive food cues on attentional breadth. In Experiment 1, we replicated findings of an influential study conducted by Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008), in which the authors demonstrated that appetitive stimuli elicit positive affect high in approach motivation, which reduces the breadth of attention. In Experiment 2, instead of using pictures of unhealthy snacks, we used pictures depicting delicious and healthy foods, mainly fruits (Domachowska et al., 2016). We replicated the original finding, i.e. the pictures of healthy food stimuli narrowed the attentional breadth and we evaluated as equally positive as the original, unhealthy stimuli. These results show that both healthy and unhealthy types of food can be seen as highly positive and elicit approach motivation. I will discuss possible factors influencing this effect.

** Irena Domachowska is a researcher at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany