A. Janet Tomiyama

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychology

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with poor mental health outcomes in adulthood. Childhood maltreatment is related to both depressive and anxiety symptoms. Our objective was to investigate these associations among low-income, mostly Black and Latino men who have sex with men (MSM), as these may be a particularly vulnerable p...

The purpose of the current study was to test the longitudinal association between disordered-eating symptoms (body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, and bulimia) in adolescence (ages 12, 14, 16, 18, 19) and adulthood (age 40) in a sample of 883 white and Black women. We also investigated moderation by race. Adolescent symptoms at each time point...

Background: Although maternal stressor exposure has been associated with shorter telomere length (TL) in offspring, this literature is based largely on White samples. Furthermore, timing of maternal stressors has rarely been examined. Here, we examined how maternal stressors occurring during adolescence, pregnancy, and across the lifespan related...

Background Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been shown to be associated with drug use in adulthood. The single ACE of household substance use history (part of the household dysfunction category) has frequently been associated with drug use. Resilience factors such as perceived social support appear to buffer the association between ACEs an...

When current conditions are probabilistically less suitable for successful reproduction than future conditions, females may prevent or delay reproduction until conditions improve. Throughout human evolution, social support was likely crucial to female reproductive success. Women may thus have evolved fertility regulation systems sensitive to cues f...

Background. Regardless of intention, the ways in which parents often choose to discuss their children’s weight (e.g. weight labeling, or telling them that they are “too fat”) can prompt body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Though the detriments of weight labeling have been established, it is not known how mothers’ previous experiences being...

Shifting societal eating patterns toward a vegetarian diet offers promise for improving public health and environmental sustainability. Yet concerns exist about racial disparities in inclusion, as some sentiments suggest that vegetarianism is stereotypically associated with Whiteness. Through four studies (total N = 3,234), we investigated associat...

Psychologists use experiments to understand causal relationships. The effects that we observe are typically shown in subsets of people using specific stimuli, yet we assume these specific effects can generalize to many different populations and circumstances than specifically tested. Here, we provide a clear demonstration of how the set of stimuli...

Although it has been demonstrated that (a) body dissatisfaction and internalization of societal appearance standards contribute to disordered eating and (b) that internalization of societal appearance standards leads to decreased skin color satisfaction among Black women, it has not been established whether skin color dissatisfaction contributes to...

In addition to its immediate negative consequences, childhood sexual abuse is associated with lifelong deleterious mental and physical health outcomes. This review employs a biopsychosocial perspective to better understand pathways from childhood sexual abuse to eating disorders, food and drug addictions, and obesity across the life course. Guided...

Plant-based foods offer great promise for ensuring environmental sustainability. However, encouraging people to replace meat-based meals with plant-based meals is a difficult feat, as people often perceive meat consumption as socially normal, evolutionarily natural, and satisfying in taste. In the current research, we tested a subtle strategy for c...

Background: Experiencing weight stigma during pregnancy is detrimental to psychosocial health outcomes, including increasing maternal stress and undermining engagement in health behaviors. Guided by a recent socioecological framework, close interpersonal relationships are integral in pregnancy to facilitate healthy behaviors and protect maternal m...

Objective: Although exposure to abuse in early life predicts earlier pubertal timing, especially for girls, it is unclear if this association generalizes to non-abuse stressors. Additionally, the impact of race on the stress-maturation association remains unknown. To address these issues, we examined whether race moderates the effects of early adv...

Cultured meat—real animal flesh produced from in vitro cell cultures, without the need to raise animals—is now poised to become publicly available. Compared to conventional meat, cultured meat offers environmental benefits in its production using less water and yielding fewer greenhouse gas emissions. However, many people find cultured meat too dis...

Background Vaccinating the public against COVID-19 is critical for pandemic recovery, yet a large proportion of people remain unwilling to get vaccinated. Beyond known factors like perceived vaccine safety or COVID-19 risk, an overlooked sentiment contributing to vaccine hesitancy may rest in moral cognition. Specifically, we theorize that a factor...

Evidence suggests that physical activity on a daily basis dampens the extent to which one experiences elevations in negative affect in response to daily stressors. Yet, these studies primarily relied solely on end-of-day recall of stressors and negative affect, and self-reported physical activity. More intensive assessments throughout the day and a...

Objective In youth, a preoccupation with weight and the desire to be thinner, or drive for thinness, might persist into adulthood and predict reward-based compulsive eating and greater weight status. Methods A total of 623 women were enrolled from a prospective cohort study starting at 10 years old and assessed up to 20 years later. Drive for thin...

Increased consumption of highly processed foods may result in lower diet quality, and low diet quality is associated with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. One mechanism driving highly processed food intake is the expectation that eating these foods will improve emotional experiences, particularly among individua...

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—...

Objective To experimentally test weight stigma and weight stigma by association in a parent-child relationship using a large, community-based sample. Methods We conducted a randomized experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk using an online survey. Participants were randomly assigned to view a picture of a parent-child dyad, for which the parent and c...

Objective This study is a secondary analysis testing the effects of an internet eating disorder prevention program on reward-based eating drive in a high-risk sample of college-aged women. Method We analyzed data from 278 women who were randomized to internet dissonance-based intervention (DBI-I), internet cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBTI), or...

Objective: Perceived stress, lower fruit intake, and comfort eating are all risk factors for chronic disease. The present pilot study aimed to simultaneously mitigate all three risk factors by applying Pavlovian conditioning to change the nature of comfort eating. Specifically, stressed participants underwent a Pavlovian conditioning intervention...

The objective of this research brief was to assess if prenatal weight stigma is a predictive factor for perinatal complications compared to pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI). Data were assessed from 358 women. Results indicated weight stigma concerns increased the odds of gestational diabetes, with a stronger association than BMI.

Can perceptions of impurity uniquely explain moral judgment? Or is moral judgment reducible to perceptions of harm? Whereas some perspectives posit that purity violations may drive moral judgment distinctly from harm violations, other perspectives contend that perceived harm is an essential precursor of moral condemnation. We tested these competing...

Background Weight stigma is pervasive across the U.S. and is associated with poor health outcomes including all-cause mortality. One potential reason that weight stigma may be detrimental to health is that it begets poorer health behaviors. Therefore, the present study tested for associations between weight stigma and four health behaviors (i.e., e...

Vaccinating the public against COVID-19 is critical for pandemic recovery, yet a large proportion of people remain unwilling to get vaccinated. Beyond known factors like perceived vaccine safety or COVID-19 risk, an overlooked sentiment contributing to vaccine hesitancy may rest in moral cognition. Specifically, we theorize that a factor fueling he...

The study of memory is commonly associated with neuroscience, aging, education, and eyewitness testimony. Here we discuss how eating behavior is also heavily intertwined-and yet considerably understudied in its relation to memory processes. Both are influenced by similar neuroendocrine signals (e.g., leptin and ghrelin) and are dependent on hippoca...

Understanding gender differences in meat consumption can help strengthen efforts to improve the sustainability of eating patterns. Compared to women, men eat more meat and are less open to becoming vegetarian. Simply considering between-gender differences, however, may overlook meaningful within-gender heterogeneity in how masculine and feminine id...

How well do we remember eating food? Some nutritional scientists have decried memory of eating as being highly unreliable (i.e. low in accuracy), but it is unclear if memory of eating is particularly worse than memory of other behaviors. In fact, evolutionary reasoning suggests the mammalian memory system might be biased towards enhanced memory of...

Plant-based diets are beneficial to human health and environmental sustainability but suffer from low rates of adherence. For example, many people who self-identify as vegetarian sporadically eat meat and eventually give up their vegetarian diet entirely. We theorize that valuing a lifestyle of pro-environmental behaviors can enable people to adher...

The first months of 2020 rapidly threw people into a period of societal turmoil and pathogen threat with the COVID‐19 pandemic. By promoting epistemic and existential motivational processes and activating people's behavioral immune systems, this pandemic may have changed social and political attitudes. The current research specifically asked the fo...

When current conditions are probabilistically less suitable for successful reproduction than future conditions, females may prevent or delay reproduction until conditions improve. Throughout human evolution, social support was likely crucial to female reproductive success. Women may thus have evolved fertility regulation systems sensitive to cues f...

Nearly 46 million Americans experience food insecurity, which is the inconsistent access to healthy and nutritious foods. Food insecurity is associated with unhealthy eating behaviors (i.e. comfort eating). However, the psychological process that explains the relationship between food insecurity and comfort eating remains elusive. Food insecurity h...

The rhetoric surrounding diet and obesity focuses on the individual—individuals exert control over their diet, and these choices directly impact a person's risk for obesity. However, social, economic, and psychological factors shape our eating and diet choices. In this entry we review these factors, describing the connections between diet and obesi...

Objective: The media often contain weight-stigmatizing material. However, little is known about pregnant and postpartum women's experiences with media-based weight stigma. Methods: Two studies investigated weight stigma in the media from multiple perspectives. Study 1 analyzed open-response examples of weight-stigmatizing experiences coming from...

The study of memory is commonly associated with neuroscience, aging, education, and eyewitness testimony. Here we discuss how eating behavior is also heavily intertwined—and yet considerably understudied in its relation to memory processes. Both are influenced by similar neuroendocrine signals (e.g., leptin and ghrelin) and are dependent on hippoca...

Background: Weight stigma is a societal phenomenon that is very prevalent in healthcare, precipitating poor patient-provider relationships, discontinuity of care, and delayed cancer screening. Little research, though, has investigated weight stigma in prenatal and postpartum healthcare. To address this gap, this study examined the prevalence and f...

Background The environmental impact of meat consumption requires immediate action. Cultured meat—which is emerging through technologies to grow meat ex vivo—has exciting potential to offset the burden of livestock agriculture by providing an alternative method to sustainably produce meat without requiring individuals to become vegetarian. However,...

It is unclear if, and to what extent, the human memory system is biased towards food and food relevant stimuli. Drawing upon existing demonstrations of attentional biases to high calorie food images, and findings that evolutionarily relevant stimuli are preferentially remembered, we hypothesized that images of high calorie foods would be better rem...

The first months of 2020 threw people into a period of societal turmoil and pathogen threat with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. By promoting epistemic and existential motivational processes and activating people’s behavioral immune systems, this pandemic may have changed social and political attitudes. The current research specifically...

The dichotomous divide between vegetarians and omnivores seems clear: Omnivores eat meat, whereas vegetarians do not. Yet classifying people dichotomously as vegetarian or omnivorous overlooks a distinct group of people who limit their meat intake but still include some meat in their diets: a group of “mostly vegetarian” dieters called flexitarians...

Health policies routinely emphasize weight loss as a target for health promotion. These policies rest upon the assumptions: (1) that higher body weight equals poorer health, (2) that long‐term weight loss is widely achievable, and (3) that weight loss results in consistent improvements in physical health. Our review of the literature suggests that...

The scientific literature on links among alcohol use, total energy intake, cardiometabolic disease and obesity is conflicting. To clarify the link between alcohol use and cardiometabolic health, this systematic review (PROSPERO CRD42016039308A) uses PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses) guidelines to synthesize...

Are all memories created equal, or are we biased to remember information most relevant to our evolutionary fitness? This question is underexplored in dominant models of memory that often treat all incoming information with equal potential to be remembered. We hypothesized that memory is systematically biased towards remembering fitness-relevant beh...

Beyond indicating that one does not eat meat, the decision to identify as vegetarian signals social identity. Yet many people limit their meat intake without giving up meat entirely: These people are called flexitarians (a term combining the words, “flexible” and “vegetarian”). Some flexitarians, despite eating meat, consider themselves to be veget...

Meat-eaters report that a number of barriers inhibit them from going vegetarian-for example, perceiving vegetarian diets to be inadequately nutritious, too expensive, unfamiliar, inconvenient, inadequately tasty, and socially stigmatizing. However, research identifying which barriers uniquely predict meat-eaters' openness to going vegetarian is lac...

Background Alcohol craving, or the desire to drink alcohol, has been identified as a key experience preceding alcohol use. Alcoholics Anonymous has long claimed that individuals can allay alcohol cravings by eating sweets. Empirical tests of this strategy are limited to a few preclinical studies in rats, and there is no existing experiment testing...

Many people who self-identify as vegetarian actually eat meat on occasion. Surveys documenting this phenomenon have become abundant over the past two decades, and recent studies have begun to explain why some vegetarians are more likely to violate their diets than others are. However, qualitative research detailing the experiences of vegetarians ea...

Reducing intake of highly processed, energy-dense food may prevent chronic disease. One proposed intervention strategy for reducing intake of these foods is to increase non-food reward experiences (e.g., music, socializing, art) in their place. However, research supporting this strategy has yet to establish temporal order between non-food reward ex...

Weight stigma is increasingly prevalent, highly distressing, and associated with an array of negative health and psychological outcomes. Many of the known correlates - depression, stress, and weight gain - have the potential to be particularly harmful in the context of pregnancy and the postpartum, a life phase in which women's social roles, body w...

Many people eat unhealthy foods that are high in calories, fat, or sugar when feeling stressed, yet little is known about whether this unhealthy comfort eating actually comforts. Additionally, prior research has not tested whether healthy comfort eating of fruits and vegetables might also alleviate stress, or whether comfort eating during the stres...

Research on the psychology of eating behavior often treats vegetarians as a monolithic group. Yet, a considerable proportion of people (17% in Study 1) who self-identify as vegetarian are actually pescatarians—those who forgo all meats except fish. Research on the psychology of pescatarianism is profoundly lacking, which may hinder future intervent...

Objective: Weight stigma adversely affects the health of the general population, but almost no studies have examined possible negative consequences of weight stigma in the context of pregnancy. The present study tested whether experiencing weight stigma in pregnancy is inversely related to mental and physical health in mothers during the first pos...

Objective The prevalence of obesity has created a plethora of questionnaires characterizing psychological aspects of eating behavior, such as reward‐related eating (RRE). The Reward‐based Eating Drive questionnaires (RED‐9, RED‐13) broadly and deeply assess the RRE construct. However, large‐sample research designs require shorter questionnaires tha...

Many pathways connect stress and obesity, two highly prevalent problems facing society today. First, stress interferes with cognitive processes such as executive function and self-regulation. Second, stress can affect behavior by inducing overeating and consumption of foods that are high in calories, fat, or sugar; by decreasing physical activity;...

Background: In an era when obesity prevalence is high throughout much of the world, there is a correspondingly pervasive and strong culture of weight stigma. For example, representative studies show that some forms of weight discrimination are more prevalent even than discrimination based on race or ethnicity. Discussion: In this Opinion article...

Over 2 decades ago, social psychological research revealed that weight stigma may undermine educational achievement. This study documented that a greater proportion of college students were thin compared with the general population and that heavier females received less college financial support from parents than thinner females (Crandall, 1995). A...

Risky eating—that is, indulging in ultra-processed, high-calorie foods including sweets, salty snacks, and/or fried foods—harms physical health. Yet, risky eating is pervasive with many people unwilling to give it up. Why do people engage in risky eating despite known risks? The current research tests a novel hypothesis that engaging in risky eatin...

Purpose of Review Many individuals seek to improve their health by restricting intake of alcohol or food. This paper critically examines the existing literature on how restricted alcohol use may increase eating and, reciprocally, how restricted eating may increase alcohol use. Recent Findings Prior non-human animal research suggests that (a) alcoh...

Self-identification of being overweight has been associated with overeating and weight gain in observational studies, irrespective of whether the individual in question is objectively overweight. The aims of the present studies were to examine whether experimentally manipulating the psychosocial experience of feeling overweight impacted on snack fo...

Objective: Ibudilast (IBUD) is a neuroimmune modulator that inhibits phosphodiesterase-4 and -10 and macrophage migration inhibitory factor. A randomized, placebo-control, crossover human laboratory trial advanced IBUD development for alcohol use disorder and found that IBUD reduced tonic levels of alcohol craving. Given the importance of consider...

Purpose: Weight stigma is implicated in disordered eating, but much of this research focuses on forms of stigma such as weight-based teasing. Methods: In a large cohort of adolescent girls (N = 2,036), we tested the hypothesis that being labeled as "too fat" by others predicts subsequent greater disordered eating cognitions and behaviors. Resul...

Purpose: Comfort eating is a prevalent behavior. Prior research shows that comfort eating is associated with reduced stress responses and increased metabolic risk across adolescence, young adulthood, and middle adulthood. The purpose of the current research was to test if comfort eating prospectively predicted all-cause mortality in older adulthoo...

Time spent sitting is associated with negative health outcomes, motivating some individuals to adopt standing desk workstations. This study represents the first investigation of the effects of standing desk use on reading comprehension and creativity. In a counterbalanced, within-subjects design, 96 participants completed reading comprehension and...

Objectives: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to a variety of diseases in adulthood, including cancer. However, current research has yet to determine if all abuse types are associated with cancer and if women are more adversely impacted by ACEs than men. Methods: Data from the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a n...

A total of 67 pairs of female roommates were randomized into a diet condition: (1) both ate normally; (2) one dieted, the other ate normally; and (3) both dieted. Adherence, weight loss, anxiety, depression, disordered eating symptoms, and stress were measured. Dieters lost more weight than non-dieters, but average loss was <1 pound. Pairs where bo...

A diversity of scales capture facets of reward-related eating (RRE). These scales assess food cravings, uncontrolled eating, addictive behavior, restrained eating, binge eating, and other eating behaviors. However, these scales differ in terms of the severity of RRE they capture. We sought to incorporate the items from existing scales to broaden th...

BACKGROUND: Delayed immunologic aging is purported to be a major mechanism through which calorie restriction (CR) exerts its anti-aging effects in non-human species. However, in non-obese humans, the effect of CR on the immune system has been understudied relative to its effects on the cardiometabolic system. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether CR is ass...

Health psychologists aim to improve eating behaviour to achieve health. Yet the effectiveness of healthy eating interventions is often minimal. This ineffectiveness may be in part because many healthy eating interventions are in a battle against evolved mechanisms (e.g., hedonic and related systems) that promote the consumption of energy-dense food...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to increased use of tobacco products later in life. However, studies to date have ignored smokeless tobacco products. To address this, data from the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which interviewed adults 18 years and over (N = 102,716) were analyzed. Logistic regression models...

Objective: Although a considerable amount of research has revealed connections between weight stigma and mental and physical health outcomes, no studies to date have experimentally manipulated the experience of obesity to understand how weight stigma causally affects eating behavior, physiology, and psychological well-being. Research has also not...

International Journal of Obesity accepted article preview online, 20 May 2016. doi:10.1038/ijo.2016.100.

International Journal of Obesity accepted article preview online, 02 May 2016. doi:10.1038/ijo.2016.83.

The United States (US) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed rules allowing employers to penalize employees up to 30% of health insurance costs if they fail to meet 'health' criteria such as reaching a specified Body Mass Index (BMI). Our objective was to examine cardiometabolic health misclassifications given standard BMI categories...

Seminal health behaviour theories and behaviour modification techniques are applied to health behaviours individually. Limited empirical work investigates how change in one health behaviour may change another. This study proposes a food-alcohol competition hypothesis, where individuals tend to consume one rewarding substance to the other's exclusio...

In the battle to combat obesity rates in the United States, several misconceptions have dominated policy initiatives. We address those misconceptions, including the notion that restrictive diets lead to long-term weight loss, that stigmatizing obesity is an effective strategy for promoting weight reduction, and that weight and physical health shoul...

Fildes et al.(1) present sobering data on the reality of sustained weight loss for individuals with obesity. These authors concluded that current approaches to weight loss have failed and suggest, "research to develop wider reaching public health policies is needed to prevent obesity at the population level." We agree that advances in research and...

Long-term psychological stress is associated with BMI increases in children as they transition to adulthood, whereas long-term maintenance of physical activity can slow excess weight gain. We hypothesized that in addition to these main effects, long-term physical activity mitigates the relationship between long-term stress and BMI increase. The NHL...