Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior
By Jennifer L. Harris, John A. Bargh, K. Brownell. Health Psychology, 2009
984 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Objective Health advocates have focused on the prevalence of advertising for calorie-dense low-nutrient foods as a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic. This research tests the hypothesis that exposure to food advertising during television viewing may also contribute to obesity by triggering automatic snacking of available food. Design In Experiments 1a and 1b, elementary-school-aged children watched a cartoon that contained either food advertising or advertising for other products and received a snack while watching. In Experiment 2, adults watched a television program that included food advertising that promoted snacking and/or fun product benefits, food advertising that promoted nutrition benefits or no food advertising. The adults then tasted and evaluated a range of healthy to unhealthy snack foods in an apparently separate experiment. Main Outcome Measures Amount of snack foods consumed during and after advertising exposure. Results Children consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising. Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising compared to the other conditions. In both experiments, food advertising increased consumption of products not in the presented advertisements, and these effects were not related to reported hunger or other conscious influences. Conclusion These experiments demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime automatic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/273fe248424750efb04aadcf0c257f7c404e6bf7
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In Applied Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Judging nudging: can nudging improve population health? (2011, neutral): “—consumption that is further primed by advertising.”
- Engaging with energy reduction : does a climate change frame have the potential for achieving broader sustainable behaviour? (2014, background): “In a similar way, exposure to food advertising increases thoughts about food and the amount of snack food that people consume (Harris et al., 2009).”