February 12/Biotech Law Weekly -- In a study, the causal influence of chocolate craving on attentional bias for chocolate-related information was examined by experimentally inducing chocolate craving in a sample of high-trait chocolate cravers versus low-trait chocolate cravers. A sample of 35 high-trait chocoholics and 33 low-trait chocolate cravers were randomly assigned to either the exposure condition in which craving was manipulated or the non-exposure condition," scientists in Netherlands report.
"To measure attentional bias, a pictorial version of the visual search paradigm [Smeets, E., Roefs, A., van Furth, E., & Jansen, A. (2008). "Attentional Bias for Body and Food in Eating Disorders: Increased Distraction, Speeded Detection, or Both?" Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 229-238] was used, assessing two components: distraction and detection. It was found that experimentally induced chocolate craving led to increased distraction by chocolate pictures in the high-trait chocolate cravers, in comparison to the low-trait chocolate cravers. Moreover, this measure of distraction correlated strongly with self-reported craving, but only in the chocoholics and in the exposure condition. In the non-exposure condition, high-trait chocolate cravers showed speeded detection of chocolate pictures relative to non-chocoholics, but this component did not correlate with self-reported craving," wrote E. Smeets and colleagues, Maastricht University.