The Influence of Coping Behaviors During a Delay of Gratification Task on Meal Intake in 7-9-Year-Old Children
Open Access
- Author:
- Lundquist, Ella Maurine
- Area of Honors:
- Nutritional Sciences
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kathleen Loralee Keller, Thesis Supervisor
Alison Diane Gernand, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- delay of gratification
childrens eating behaviors
food commercials
laboratory meal intake
coping behaviors
children
childhood obesity
looking at food
looking away from food
high-energy dense food
delay of gratification task
ability to delay gratification
weight status
children's delay of gratification - Abstract:
- This thesis is a secondary analysis of data collected during a larger study that was designed to assess the impact of food commercials on children’s brain response and meal intake behaviors. In this study, the delay of gratification task was used. This task may correlate with children’s food intake in a laboratory meal, particularly following food commercial exposure. Therefore, this report will focus on children’s laboratory meal intake from three visits (a baseline control, following toy commercials, following food commercials) and the observed coping behaviors from the delay of gratification task completed by 40 children. In the final sample, 24 children were healthy weight and 16 were overweight/obese; all were between the ages of seven to nine years old. The primary aim of this thesis was to assess if coping behaviors exhibited by children during the delay of gratification task correlated to laboratory meal intake across the three meals. A secondary aim of the thesis was to assess if the use of different coping behaviors were partly explained by variations in child weight status. Noldus Observer® XT 14 was used to code six coping behaviors during the task: looking at the food, looking away, talking, staying silent, fidgeting, and staying still. Data was analyzed using SPSS 22.0. Descriptive statistics were generated for participants and Pearson correlations were run to look at the relationships between coping behaviors, meal intake, BMI, and BMI z-scores. During the delay of gratification task, two participants ended the task early. Consequently, we ran analyses with and without those two participants. We found negative correlations between the time children spent looking away from the food reward and the consumption of food in multiple laboratory meals in our analysis including all subjects (p = 0.002 – 0.043). Excluding subjects who ended the task early, we found negative correlations between the time children spent looking away from the food reward and the consumption of food in multiple laboratory meals (p = 0.010 – 0.049). Excluding subjects who ended the task early, we also found positive correlations between the time children spent looking at the food reward and the consumption of food in multiple laboratory meals (p = 0.009 – 0.039). These significant correlations appear to be driven by differences in consumption of high-energy dense foods and exposure to food commercials. This may have implications for future research to help identify children who may be at risk for becoming overweight or obese and target interventions for them.