A Method for Manipulating Blood Glucose and Measuring Resulting Changes in Cognitive Accessibility of Target Stimuli

Much research in social psychology has investigated the impact of bodily energy need on cognition and decision-making. As such, blood glucose, the body's primary energy source, has been of special interest to researchers for years. Fluctuations in blood glucose have been linked to a variety of changes in cognitive and behavioral processes, such as self-control, political attitudes, and eating behavior. To help meet growing interest in the links between bodily energy need and these processes, this manuscript offers a simple methodology to experimentally manipulate blood glucose using a fasting procedure followed by administration of a sugar-sweetened, unsweetened, or artificially-sweetened beverage. This is followed by presentation of a method for measuring resulting changes in implicit cognition using a lexical decision-task. In this task, participants are asked to identify whether strings of letters are words or non-words and response latencies are recorded. Sample results from a recent publication are presented as an example of the applications for the experimental manipulation of blood glucose and the lexical decision task measures.