[Implicit Self-Regulation of Food-Intake: Consequences for Psychotherapy]

Explicit processes of self-regulation require insight and control during implementation and are therefore often experienced as being strenuous, while implicit processes of steering behavior are automatic, rapid and effortless. However, self-regulation is not always either explicit or implicit; all variants ranging from those that are entirely automatic to those being entirely under control are present. As individuals are not aware of their underlying implicit modes of self-regulation, it is necessary to create an approach that is proximal to affective processing, by-passing the cognitive, verbal level. Promising approaches of this kind are such including embodied experiences or such shifting the body to a state, in which the apperception of implicit mechanisms is facilitated. Given that therapeutic work of self-regulation is in many cases carried out on an explicit level of processing, the need for novel, neurobiologically founded strategies intervening on the implicit (pre-verbal) level are called for. Correspondent paradigms, e. g. the approach-avoidance task (AAT) for the assessment of implicit processes are presented here with regard to food-intake regulation. This work is a narrative (qualitative) review aiming at illustrating the field of implicit bias research as well as the development of new implicit bias training paradigms to be used as add-on in future psychotherapeutic treatments. Therefore, a selection of relevant studies based on subjective criteria was made. Thus, this work is not a systematic review and does not claim to be an exhaustive description of studies of this kind.