Generalization of evaluative conditioning toward foods: Increasing sensitivity to health in eating intentions

Evaluative conditioning (EC), the pairing of objects (conditioned stimuli; CS) with positive and negative unconditioned stimuli (US) in order to induce attitude change, has proven to be a viable method of changing attitudes toward foods and corresponding eating behaviors. Positively conditioning healthy foods and negatively conditioning unhealthy foods should result in healthier food choices. Of interest in the current research is the extent to which EC can generalize beyond the conditioned foods to entire dimensions underlying food judgment, such as health and taste.

The current research included 2 EC experiments configured in accord with the Implicit Misattribution Model (IMM; Jones, Fazio, & Olson, 2009). Four healthy CS foods were paired with positive US and 4 unhealthy CS foods were paired with negative US. Participants then reported eating intentions for a variety of foods, including non-CS foods.

Experiment 1 demonstrated that conditioning a few exemplar food items increased sensitivity to health and decreased sensitivity to taste when judging a variety of additional foods. Experiment 2 replicated the generalization effect with regard to health sensitivity, but only when a task that preceded the EC procedure promoted, rather than interfered with, categorization of the CS foods by health.

This research shows that EC can generalize to an entire dimension underlying food judgment and that this effect is facilitated by accessibility of the health dimension at the time of exposure to the EC pairings. (PsycINFO Database Record