[EDITOR'S NOTE: With attention focusing on this week's release of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," a Texas A&M University psychology professor who studies addiction examines the addictive nature of chocolate among women.]
Newswise — With a factory full of cantankerous contraptions and a team of oompa-loompas dedicated to producing the stuff, Willy Wonka knew it to be true " whether it's in the form of bars, kisses or coins: Chocolate conjures a magical spell over most people, and research at Texas A&M University is shedding light on the emotional experience that the highly addictive treat offers for chocolate addicts.
Antonio Cepeda-Benito, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M who studies drug addiction and substance dependence, says the tasty confection causes a unique reaction among chocolate cravers that may set it apart from other addictive substances.
Cepeda-Benito, along with colleagues Sonia Rodriguez, Maria Carmen Fernandez and Jamie Vila, studied women who were identified as both high and low chocolate cravers by the Food Craving Questionnaire-Trait (FCQ-T), the most reliable and valid self-report measure of food cravings. They focused their research on women because, among women, chocolate is reported as the food craved most often, and it's craved with such intensity that researchers believe it can be an emotionally charged experience.
Measuring various physical responses, Cepeda-Benito found that for the high craver chocolate evokes both positive and negative moods, creating a type of internal conflict " a finding contrary to the way most addictive substances work.
Studies typically find that stimuli that increase positive moods tend also to decrease negative moods, but the reaction among chocolate cravers doesn't fit this pattern, notes Cepeda-Benito.
Not only did high cravers report both positive and negative feelings in response to viewing chocolate images, their physical symptoms demonstrated reactions consistent with the conflict, Cepeda-Benito says. For high cravers, the intensity of their eye blinking response " something known as "the startle reflex" " increased as they viewed chocolate images. Researchers expect such a reaction when participants view unpleasant images, not images they desire, he explains.
At the same time, high cravers experienced a reduction in their "cardiac defense reflex" " a pattern of heart rate changes that typically is intensified when viewing unpleasant images and reduced while viewing pleasant ones. What's more, high cravers demonstrated increased skin conductance, as measured by increased perspiration, when they viewed chocolate images. These two measures " the cardiac defense reflex and skin conductance measure " support the concept of chocolate evoking an appetitive, positive reaction among high cravers, as their self-report indicated. However, the blink test was congruent with an established defensive reaction, which is usually interpreted as a reaction to stimuli that arouses negative emotions.
"We hypothesized that presenting chocolate images in a neutral, controlled environment would either inhibit or augment the defensive reflexes, but not both. Although chocolate cravings and drug cravings may share similar characteristics, our results are congruent with the notion that chocolate has a very particular set of associations that differentiates it from other addictive substances," Cepeda-Benito notes.
Cepeda-Benito says his findings may have an impact on the way drug addiction and bulimia nervosa are treated because current treatment methods fail to take into account how a craving might be multidimensional. Data have not consistently shown that these treatment techniques can reduce drug use or binge eating, he says. Such techniques might be improved by provoking and extinguishing both the negative and positive components of cravings, such as the ones found to be present among high chocolate cravers, he says.
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