Judgments of body size based on meal size: understanding the role of dietary restraint
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In four studies, I explored the role of dietary restraint in judgments of body size based on meal size. In Study 1, restrained and unrestrained eaters watched a video of a woman eating either a small meal or a large meal. Participants were then asked to select which of two photographs of women (a heavier one or a thinner one) was the person whom they had just seen in the video. Restrained eaters in the small-meal condition were much more likely to choose the thinner target; unrestrained eaters we unaffected by the meal-size manipulation in their selection of the target photograph. These findings are consistent with previous work (Vartanian, 2000) demonstrating that restrained eaters (but not unrestrained eaters) judge women who eat smaller meals as being thinner and weighing less than women who eat larger meals. The next three studies were designed to explore certain specific differences between restrained and unrestrained eaters that could help to explain the observed differences in body-size judgments. Studies 2 and 3 focused on restraint differences in inhibitory-control functioning. In both studies, participants completed a garden-path-sentence task, which assessed implicit recall of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. If inhibitory control is functioning optimally, individuals should recall only task-relevant information. In Study 2, unrestrained eaters recalled only task-relevant information, whereas restrained eaters tended to recall both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, suggesting that they are less capable of suppressing or deleting irrelevant information. In Study 3, the instructions were modified slightly to guard against potential group differences in attention due to restrained eaters' perfectionistic tendencies. The pattern of results was directly opposite to that found in Study 2. Study 4 focused on group differences in personal beliefs about the connection between food intake and body weight/size. Restrained eaters were more likely to believe that the amount of food that one eats is predictive of one's body weight, whereas unrestrained eaters were more likely to believe that one's weight is fixed and genetically determined. The discussion focuses on the importance of these personal beliefs in social judgments, as well as in other areas such as one's own personal behavior.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".