Dietary restraint and addictive behaviors: The generalizability of Tiffany's Cue Reactivity Model

UNLABELLED: Two studies are presented, which examine cue reactivity in dieting. METHODS: Experiment 1 investigated whether the presence of a preferred food affected dieters' performance on measures of attention, reaction time, and motor speed. The manipulation did not affect the performance. Experiment 2 investigated the performance of dieters (N = 19), highly restrained non-dieters (N = 18) and low-to-medium restrained eaters (N = 34) on two simple reaction time tasks. Subjects were either required to imagine their favorite food or to imagine their favorite holiday while completing a reaction time task. RESULTS: In the food condition, both dieters and restrained nondieters displayed significantly slower reaction times during the first three of five blocks of the task than the low-to-medium restrained eaters. CONCLUSIONS: The results are discussed in terms of Tiffany's (Psychological Review 97:147-168, 1990) model of cue reactivity in that different abstinent states produce comparable effects upon performance.