Lexical decision times for body shape words as a function of dietary restraint.

Two studies are presented which investigate the relationship between dietary restraint and performance on a task in which subjects made lexical decisions for body shape and affectively neutral control words. The first experiment found no dietary restraint related differences in lexical decision times for body shape and neutral words. The second experiment found that, when certain methodological problems were controlled for, highly restrained eaters made lexical decisions concerning body shape words faster than for affectively neutral words, but did not display preferential recall for body shape related words. Further, the second experiment found that lexical decision times were significantly related to performance on a self-report measure of body shape concern. The results are interpreted in terms of current theories on the relationship between cognition and emotion.