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Do you consider yourself an emotional eater? If you'd like to reduce your susceptibility to emotional eating, here's something to try. It's also a good chance to practice one of the simple experiments. The research was summarized by a journalist for PsyPost.
Recently, scientists have begun investigating the effects mindfulness-based interventions may have on emotional eating.[...] One such practice is body scan meditation, which involves slowly focusing attention on different parts of the body to promote relaxation and awareness of physical sensations.
The study participants were 81 adults classified as emotional eaters based on the results of the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Seventy-four percent of them were female. Participants’ average age was 27, and 45% identified as European or North American.
The researchers randomly divided participants into two groups. One group underwent a 16-minute body scan meditation, while the other group listened to a recording of an equally long description of the human musculoskeletal system. Neither the participants nor the researcher working with them was informed of which condition was experimental and which was the control.
Before the intervention, participants completed an interview in which researchers asked them to recall a recent episode of emotional eating. This was intended to induce a negative emotional state in participants.
Participants also completed several assessments, including "negative emotion (using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale)" and "food cravings intensity (using the Desire subscale of the Food Cravings Questionnaire – state version)", as well as other variables.
Results showed that participants who completed the body scan meditation session experienced a greater reduction in negative affect and cravings from before to after the treatment compared to the group subjected to the listening task.
a) Reread the description above and identify the study’s variables.
|
Variable name |
What were this variable’s levels? |
Was this manipulated or measured? |
Was this variable an IV? Or a DV? |
For the IV: was it independent groups or within groups? |
b) What kind of experiment was this: Posttest only? Pretest/posttest? Repeated measures? Or concurrent measures?
c) Sketch a graph of the results. Don't forget to include pretest and posttest data.
d) Here is a list of internal validity threats in Chapter 11. Check the definition of each term in Table 11.1. Which of these threats is likely ruled out by the study's design, and why?
Selection effect
Order effect
Design confound
Maturation
History
Instrumentation
Testing
Attrition
Regression to the mean
Placebo effects
Demand characteristics
Observer effects
