Judgments of body size based on meal size
Subtitle: understanding the role of dietary restraint.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 137
Description: In four studies, I explored the role of dietary restraint in judgments of body size based on meal size. In Study 1, restrained and unrestrained eaters watched a video of a woman eating either a small meal or a large meal. Participants were then asked to select which of two photographs of women (a heavier one or a thinner one) was the person whom they had just seen in the video. Restrained eaters in the small-meal condition were much more likely to choose the thinner target; unrestrained eaters we unaffected by the meal-size manipulation in their selection of the target photograph. These findings are consistent with previous work (Vartanian, 2000) demonstrating that restrained eaters (but not unrestrained eaters) judge women who eat smaller meals as being thinner and weighing less than women who eat larger meals. The next three studies were designed to explore certain specific differences between restrained and unrestrained eaters that could help to explain the observed differences in body-size judgments. Studies 2 and 3 focused on restraint differences in inhibitory-control functioning. In both studies, participants completed a garden-path-sentence task, which assessed implicit recall of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. If inhibitory control is functioning optimally, individuals should recall only task-relevant information. In Study 2, unrestrained eaters recalled only task-relevant information, whereas restrained eaters tended to recall both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, suggesting that they are less capable of suppressing or deleting irrelevant information. In Study 3, the instructions were modified slightly to guard against potential group differences in attention due to restrained eaters' perfectionistic tendencies. The pattern of results was directly opposite to that found in Study 2. Study 4 focused on group differences in personal beliefs about the connection between food intake and body weight/size. Restrained eaters were more likely to believe that the amount of food that one eats is predictive of one's body weight, whereas unrestrained eaters were more likely to believe that one's weight is fixed and genetically determined. The discussion focuses on the importance of these personal beliefs in social judgments, as well as in other areas such as one's own personal behavior.
Notes: Adviser:  C. Peter Herman.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: B, page: 5464.