The Effect of Advertising and Food Intake - Essay Example

Is the effect of advertising and food intake enhanced by positive mood? Introduction In the past, studies conducted about mood and eating behavior have often focused on the impact of negative emotion on food consumption (Canetti, Bachar, & Berry, 2002). These studies suggest that people tend to eat more when they experience negative events because they want to alleviate bad moodsd (Canetti, Bachar, & Berry, 2002). However, another line of research has suggested a different hypothesis. Work by Christensen and Brooks (2006) found that people consume more food when they are in a positive mood, and tend to prefer healthy food as opposed to unhealthy food, which is more often eaten during bad moods. On the other hand, the effect of mood on advertisements and eating behavior has been recently studied in order to understand the reasons behind the increasing prevalence of obesity in America and prevent obesity in future generations. Studies conducted about eating behavior in children show that more exposure to junk food advertising via the television is associated with positive attitudes toward junk food, which thus increases the amount of junk food consumption (Dixon et al., 2007). Studies conducted by Harris et al. (2009) showed that watching food advertisements increased the amount of food intake in adult participants; increases were found in both healthy and unhealthy food. This suggests that priming of food in advertising causes people to indulge in eating more than is necessary for their daily metabolic activity. In conjunction with eating behavior, previous research has found a link between priming and mood. Happy moods are assumed to facilitate the accessibility and use of semantic concepts (Storbeck & Clore, 2008). Work by Avramova et al. (2008) also suggested that moods can alter perceptual focus, such that positive moods lead to a more global focus, while negative moods lead to a more local focus. Therefore, when people are in a positive mood, accessible knowledge is more likely to lead to assimilation; whereas when they are in a negative mood, accessible knowledge is more likely to lead to contrast (Avramova et al., 2008). These findings help elucidate how individuals experiencing positive moods are susceptible to certain information in advertisements, and how this selected information subsequently affects their decision-making relating to food intake. In essence, mood, advertisements, and eating behavior are all interrelated. Priming effects from food advertisements are enhanced by positive mood conditions, as positive mood allows information to be processed abstractly and promotes positive responses to unhealthy food advertisements by endorsing gratification (Storbeck, 2008; Dixon et al., 2007). Therefore, advertisement effects will be enhanced by mood, which will affect eating behavior. This research proposal hypothesizes that inducing a positive mood before watching unhealthy food advertisements will increase an individual’s intake of unhealthy food rather than healthy food, and that this increase will be greater than those in a neutral mood condition. Method Participants One hundred and twenty students currently taking Introductory to Psychology (PSY100H) at the University of Toronto will be recruited as participants for the proposed study. All participants will receive monetary compensation or course credit for their participation. Materials Mood manipulation was based on Storbeck and Clore (2008). The happy mood group listened to Eine Kliene Nacht Musik by Mozart for 12 minutes, while the neutral mood group listened to an audio recording explaining how to build a house for 12 minutes. The mood manipulation check consisted of one question: “how were you feeling while listening to the music?” for the positive mood group. Responses were placed on a scale of (1) very unhappy to (7) very happy. In the neutral mood condition, the question was “how were you feeling while listening to the passage?” The advertisement stimuli consisted of five fictional brands of unhealthy food advertisements such as candy bars, chocolate, popcorn, cookies, and chips in the prime condition, and five non-food advertisements in the control condition. Each advertisement ran for approximately two minutes, for a total or 10 minutes of exposure in each condition. After watching the videos, all the participants were given a questionnaire asking “how attractive is the advertisement?” on a scale of (0) very unattractive to (10) very attractive. All participants watched the video alone in a small, comfortable room. In order to control for the effects of hunger that participants may feel, which may affect the number of high calorie coupons they choose to take, participants were asked to complete the PANAS current mood assessment (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) before and after watching the advertisements. To assess hunger without alerting the participants of the food-related nature of the study, hunger and thirst ratings were embedded within the PANAS assessment. As with the mood measures, participants responded on a scale from (1) very slightly/not at all to (5) extremely, in response to “How hungry/thirsty do you feel right now, at this present moment?” Procedure The 120 participants were told that the experiment is designed to measure mood and the attractiveness of advertisements. First, they were divided into two equal groups: a positive mood condition and a control group. The group conditioned for positive mood listened to classical music, while the control group listened to a passage about how to build a house. Moreover, in each mood condition, participants were primed either by watching snack advertisements or non-food advertisements for 10 minutes. In the primed condition, participants watched five fictional television advertisements about different brands of snacks, lasting for a total of 10 minutes. Then, they rated the attractiveness of the advertisements they were assigned to watch on a scale of 0 to 10. Next, the participants were told that the experiment was complete and thanked for participating by being offered coupons for free ice-cream and fruit in the cafeteria. After they took their coupons, the participants were debriefed as to the purpose of experiment by the experimenter. The participants in the unprimed condition underwent the same procedure, except that instead of watching food advertisements, they watched non-food advertisements for the same length of time. Predicted Results/Discussion The number of each type of coupon taken will show whether participants prefer unhealthy food after watching unhealthy food advertisements and whether the priming effect is enhanced by positive mood. We predict that positive mood participants will rate both types of advertisements as more attractive due to the more global accessibility of information. Thus, positive mood participants in the snack advertisement condition should take more unhealthy food coupons than positive mood participants in the non-food condition or neutral mood participants in both conditions. This study proposal will provide an understanding of why couch potatoes and obese individuals cannot stay away from the television or say no to snacks. This is because priming from food advertisements seen on the television induce them to eat. Eating elevated mood and increased activation especially with unhealthy food. For example, chocolate increases activation, reduces tiredness, elevates mood and elicits joy more than apples (Macht & Dettmer, 2006). There is an established feedback loop between mood, advertisements, and eating behavior. Watching unhealthy food advertisements leads people to eat unhealthy food. Moreover, eating unhealthy food improves one’s mood and makes one more susceptible to the positive aspects of food advertisements, thereby inducing one to increase food consumption. Obesity may be preventable if we can find a way to break this positive feedback loop in the future. For future research, it will be interesting to see how mood and advertisements play a role in the behaviors of controlled versus uncontrolled eaters. A study by Harris et al. (2008) suggested that unhealthy food advertisement had a powerful effect on restrained eaters, which increased their overall food consumption. In this study, we do not separate our participants into controlled and uncontrolled eaters, which we acknowledge to be a limitation. Mood associated with priming may influence controlled and uncontrolled eaters differently, which we have not allowed for in our study. Furthermore, a trend was observed that indicated that men ate more than women following exposure to snack advertisements (Harris et al., 2008). This is worth investigating, as the majority of research seems to focus on women’s eating behavior during mood manipulation. A previously unexplored area of eating behavior research that can be studied in the future is whether or not mood manipulation followed by exposure to food advertisements will have an effect on men’s eating behavior. References Avramova, Y. R., and Stapel, D. A. (2008). Moods as spotlights: The influence of mood on accessibility effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 542–554. Christensen, L., and Brooks, A. (2006). Changing food preference as a function of mood. The Journal of Psychology, 140, 293–306. Dixon, H. G., Scully, M. L., Wakefield, M. A., White, V. M., and Crawford, D. A. (2007). The effects of television advertisements for junk food versus nutritious food on children’s food attitudes and preferences. Social Science & Medicine, 65, 1311–1323. Harris, J. L., Bargh, J. A., and Brownell, K. D. (2009). Priming effects of television food advertising on eating behavior. Health Psychology, 28, 404–413. Macht, M. and Dettmer, D. (2006). Everyday mood and emotions after eating a chocolate bar or an apple. Appetite, 46, 332–336. Storbeck, J., and Clore, G. L. (2008). The affective regulation of cognitive priming. Emotion, 8, 208–215. Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070. Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilberger, J. L. (2005). Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 121–235. Read More