Operant Eating: The Importance Of Operant Conditioning

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Many efforts to address emotional eating have emphasized the importance of effective mood regulations skills to enhance one’s ability to tolerate stress or negative mood without using food to cope (Telch, Agras, & Linehan, 2001). Only within the past 20 years has research focused on applying more traditional learning processes to the development and maintenance of emotional eating. The primary difference between these perspectives, as exemplified by the Davidson model, is the de-emphasis of cognitions and motivations for eating (e.g., to escape negative mood) in the learning models, such as the classical conditioning model. Although arguments could be made for the influence of operant conditioning on disordered eating, classical conditioning is assumed to a major component in the development of maladaptive eating behaviors (Greeno & Wing, 1994; Jansen, 1998). Empirical evidences supports classical conditioning models of eating desires. For instance, Van Gucht et al. (2008) tested the ability to condition serving trays (i.e., neutral stimuli) of different shapes and colors to elicit chocolate cravings. Conditioning consisted of three phases: …show more content…

Thus, Van Gucht and colleagues (2008) provided empirical support for the idea that neutral stimuli can be paired with food through classical conditioning and that these stimuli can elicit craving and approach tendencies. Additional studies have corroborated the conclusion that food cues can be conditioned via Pavlovian conditioning procedures (Van Gucht, Baeyens, Hermans, & Beckers, 2010; Van Gucht, Vansteenwegen, Beckers, & Van Den Bergh, 2008). However, none of these studies have addressed the most important question relating to emotional eating: can emotions can become a CS through classical

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