Abstract
Among the factors shown to influence patterns in food consumption, attentional biases toward food cues have been found to play an important role in the maintenance of maladaptive eating behaviors, such as emotional eating, overeating or eating in the absence of hunger. As such, attention bias modification interventions have traditionally focused on retraining attention away from food towards neutral stimuli. However, recent theoretical upgrades and empirical findings highlight that maladaptive eating habits are not only associated with biases towards food in general, but particularly to biases towards unhealthy, calorie-dense foods. More specifically, individuals showing maladaptive eating patterns have a higher tendency to automatically turn their attention towards unhealthy food cues in their environment and to perceive them as being more salient. Thus, a more theoretically sound and ecologically valid aim of attention bias modification interventions is to retrain attention away from unhealthy food cues towards healthier ones in a computerised manner.
The current study presents the theoretical rationale and the development of SANATENT, a gamified mHealth attentional bias modification intervention, designed to curb unhealthy eating habits and promote the consumption of healthy food. Within the intervention, a minimum of two and a maximum of six food images appear concurrently on the screen, with a single food item representing a healthy choice. Users are instructed to choose the correct image as fast and as accurately as possible, thus prompting them to ignore the unhealthy food options. SANATENT is envisioned to alter users' attentional biases in their ecological environment, thus being suited to function as either a stand-alone intervention or as a therapeutic adjuvant. Moreover, the application is based on gamification principles of learning, making it more appealing to use and potentially facilitating adherence to treatment.
Practical and theoretical implications, as well as directions for future studies will be discussed. |