David A. Booth

University of Sussex · School of Psychology

Comment by Booth on Segundo-Ortin & Calvo on 'Plant Sentience' Abstract: Contributors to this discussion acknowledge ambiguities in the terms used, including ‘feelings’, ‘behavior’, ‘cognition’ and ‘sentience’ itself. Yet they continue to use such words without reference to scientific criteria established by experimental psychology.

This preprint outlines an upcoming critical narrative evaluation of a new source of evidence about changes in behaviour that improve personal wellbeing. Existing research and practice are compared to an innovative use of information and communication technology that has the potential to provide global access to education in locally specified change...

The public's trust in the science of avoiding unhealthy weight depends on a radical reform of the design and execution of weight loss programmes and their clinical trials. This Perspective reiterates the longstanding argument for measuring the effectiveness of each component of an intervention on obesity. Body energy content change results from a d...

This preprint outlines an upcoming critical narrative evaluation of a new source of evidence about changes in behaviour that improve personal wellbeing. Existing research and practice are compared to an innovative use of information and communication technology that has the potential to provide global access to education in locally specified change...

It was suggested that the ingestion of extra calories towards the end of or shortly after a meal might be especially fattening. That hypothesis was based on the intuition that mixing of the sugared drink and accompaniments while the stomach was emptying rapidly would delay the release of hunger less than the same intake in the hour before the next...

This preprint outlines an upcoming critical narrative evaluation of a new source of evidence about changes in behaviour that improve personal wellbeing. Existing research and practice are compared to an innovative use of information and communication technology that has the potential to provide global access to education in locally specified change...

Abstract. Recognizing matches aspects of the circumstances to previous situations. It is proposed that an individual’s mind uses such similarities between present and past as discrimination-scaled dimensions within a hierarchy of manifolds. The content of attention is the most effective combination of these causal processes across the mind – that i...

Recognizing matches aspects of the circumstances to previous situations. It is proposed that an individual’s mind uses such similarities between present and past as discrimination-scaled dimensions within a hierarchy of manifolds. The content of attention is the most effective combination of these causal processes across the mind – that is, the ins...

The authors have proposed that increased insulin secretion on a high-carbohydrate diet increases body fat content in a way that raises body weight. The scatterplots presented in this report indicate, to the contrary, suppression of insulin secretion by the osmotic stress from oral glucose and of the fat content of weight loss by the stress of dieta...

The Perspective by David S. Ludwig and co-authors compares their Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of obesity with commonly held views based on what they call the Energy Balance Model. Their account of both models is fundamentally flawed. First, thermodynamics concerns the rates (MJ/day) of exchange of energy between the body and the environment, not cumu...

Some psychologists have viewed sadness and depression as reactions to past loss, while regarding fear and anxiety as responses to future threat. Such assumptions conflict with common experience of gloom about the future and worry about the past. Recent research on these issues by experiment and/or by questionnaire remains inconclusive. The psychome...

This paper implements the innovative theory that mental processes discriminate present from past social and physical environments for an example of charitable donation. The theory specifies designs for questionnaires that measure individuals’ mechanisms of perception, emotion and decision in particular circumstances. The example illustrated here wa...

It is not known how much reduction in weight is caused by an increased frequency of breakfasts including more protein, or whether such a practice suppresses intake by subconscious post-ingestional effects or intentional reduction in frequency of consumption of other foods. Participants with low frequency of what they believed to be higher protein b...

Suboptimality of decision making needs no explanation. High-level accounts of suboptimality in diverse tasks cannot add up to a mechanistic theory of perceptual decision making. Mental processes operate on the contents of information brought by the experimenter and the participant to the task, not on the amount of information in the stimuli without...

Some individuals have a neurogenetic vulnerability to developing strong facilitation of ingestive movements by learned configurations of biosocial stimuli. Condemning food as addictive is mere polemic, ignoring the contextualised sensory control of the mastication of each mouthful. To beat obesity, the least fattening of widely recognised eating pa...

The first published demonstration of multimodal (oral-gastric) configural (learnt unique stimulus) control of meal and (dessert) portion sizes from a regular menu in human beings was by Booth, Lee & McAleavy (1976 Br J Psychol). The 'post-print' uploaded here presents the same data in two ways from different publications: (1) a summary bar graph an...

The usual theories and methods in psychology are ill suited to investigations of adaptive causal systems living within biological and societal orders. The primary invalidating flaw is the aiming of research at a generic entity called The Mind. In reality there are only many particular minds operating on partly shared circumstances. A fundamental th...

This talk briefly presents an experiment which illustrates the scientific theory that embodied and acculturated systems (such as you and me) represent information in the environment by causally processing its content in mathematically determinate ways. Three colleagues stated the strengths of emotions they saw in sets of keyboard characters that (b...

My data-crunching theory of how an individual mind works provides a new look at the approach to consciousness developed by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein (Blue & Brown Books, 1934/1956). Wittgenstein argued that how things seem is not access to another world but seeing things as if they were that way in our shared world. In the most basic biosocial...

In 1952–1957, Peryam and colleagues developed nine ordinal phrases of liking and dislike to assess consumers' dispositions to accept or reject a food or drink. They named their questionnaire a Food Preference Scale. Others called it the Hedonic Scale, which means assessment of pleasure, not choice. It is still widely assumed that the word “like” di...

Abstract. Quantitative overall judgments of a visual and orosensory object discriminated a partly masked feature better than did feature-specific judgments in 34 out of 52 participants. The mediating interactions among elemental discriminative processes were calculated from the data of each participant. The canonical concept of the orosensory featu...

"Food consumption patterns to reduce and prevent obesity" Invited Lecture to McGill University School of Dietetics & Human Nutrition, 27 November 2008 (PDF of PPT slides)

How to investigate the content of information causally processed within a human being or an engineered socially intelligent system (Departmental Seminar, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham)

Abstract. The personal disposition to be helpful is most validly measured within a culture in terms of locally recognized categories of helping activity. This paper illustrates the collection and categorization of a corpus of actual incidents of Good Samaritanism, recounted by recruits in public places. The frequency with which an individual execut...

Working Paper on subliminal perception of caffeine taste in coffee

International Journal of Obesity is a monthly, multi-disciplinary forum for papers describing basic, clinical and applied studies in biochemistry, genetics and nutrition, together with molecular, metabolic, psychological and epidemiological aspects of obesity and related disorders

Slides (106) for a Seminar at COGS, University of Sussex (UK), Feb 2015. Precirculated Abstract (on Slide 2): ... the simplest known theory of conscious and unconscious processes that mediate a person’s achievements in intending, reacting, sensing, perceiving and thinking. (I) The basic principle is that an individual system has mental states whic...

Dietary guidelines for the general public aim to lower the incidence of nutrition-related diseases by influencing habitual food choices. Yet little is known about how well the guidelines are matched by the actual practices that people regard as healthy or unhealthy. In the present study, British residents were asked in a cognitive interview to writ...

Evidence of one person’s intentions, emotions, perceptions, descriptions and associations of the moment can be calculated from an exchange of sentences in a social situation or single key words in response to a material object. This talk will focus on the example of ratings of factorial vignettes of an appeal for help. The responses to the combined...

These seminar slides summarise the development of a theory of mental processes anchored on the learnt norm for the situation in the mind of a participant of an experimental simulation of a real-life task. The presentation gives a wide range of examples of findings from this approach.

In the late 1980s, Mark Conner found that a majority of people tested on their usual coffee drink were better discriminating between levels of caffeine by their ratings of overall preference than by rated bitterness. Thanks to Richard Freeman initially and Oliver Sharpe very recently, we now have the software to calculate the mental processes by wh...

These 10 slides are from a brief presentation to a Workshop of the University of Birmingham's multidisciplinary initiative on Work, Wealth and Well-being in September 2014.

Purpose – This research study illustrated the mapping of each consumer's mental processes in a market-relevant context. This paper shows how such maps deliver operational insights that cannot be gained by physical methods such as brain imaging. Design/methodology/approach – A marketed conceptual attribute and a sensed material characteristic of a p...

Physiological signals measured by food- and time-specific expected satiety L.A. DIBSDALL, D.A. BOOTH. Food Quality and Nutritional Psychology Research Group, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT Email: D.A.Booth@sussex.ac.uk [School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton] The most sensiti...

The only way that the chemical senses can affect nutrition is by influencing selection among amounts of foods and drinks to ingest. Fundamental to the science of nutrition, therefore, is a correct theoretical understanding of the mechanisms by which tasted and smelled molecules affect the choice of each mouthful, and hence also the number of mouthf...

Abstract (for the combined three Parts of version 5). This paper presents the simplest known theory of processes involved in a person’s unconscious and conscious achievements such as intending, perceiving, reacting and thinking. The basic principle is that an individual has mental states which possess quantitative causal powers and are susceptible...

This paper reviews all the published evidence on the theory that the act of selecting a piece of food or drink structurally coordinates quantitative information across several sensory modalities. The existing data show that the momentary disposition to consume the item is strengthened or weakened by learnt configurations of stimuli perceived throug...

Laguna-Camacho A, Nouwen A & Booth DA (2013) Amount of weight loss by consuming calories between meals less often. Obesity Facts 6 (suppl 1), 125. -- Abstract -- Introduction: It is been proposed that adding more calories to a stomach that is still quite full from the previous meal does not keep hunger suppressed as well as calories taken in during...

Slides for presentation at BFDG, Loughborough University: abstract in Appetite 71, 471. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2013.06.012

We have developed a method for directly measuring the ultimate effect on body weight of a maintained change in a well-known habit of eating, exercise or thermal control. The first step is to extract a consensus on the words used to identify common habits in a sample from the population to be studied. In this work, we focused on habits for which the...

Advance in food science depends on measuring the factors in human perception that influence eaters' activities with branded products. Assessed samples must include at least two levels of a sensed material characteristic (e.g. sucrose) or conceptual marketing attribute (e.g. “low fat”), minimally confounded by other features. Each feature needs to b...

Food intake can be increased by learning to anticipate the omission of subsequent meals. We present here a new theory that such anticipatory eating depends on an associative process of instrumental reinforcement by the nutritional repletion that occurs when access to food is restored. Our evidence over the last decade from a smooth-brained omnivore...

Interactions between the processing of emotion expression and form-based information from faces (facial identity) were investigated using the redundant-target paradigm, in which we specifically tested whether identity and emotional expression are integrated in a superadditive manner (Miller, Cognitive Psychology 14:247-279, 1982). In Experiments 1...

Gaps in research on reduction of obesity (Chapter 1) can be filled by experiments on effects on weight of changing the frequencies of habits of healthy eating and exercise (Chapter 2). This Thesis shows that changes in weight and customary habits can be tracked reliably. People’s descriptions of meals as healthy were consistent with national guidel...

Rats can learn to anticipate the omission of subsequent meals by increasing food intake. Our previous reports have analysed group means at each trial but that does not allow for rats learning at different speeds. This paper presents instead a rat-by-rat analysis of all the raw data from previous experiments. The re-analysis supports the published e...

HIGHLIGHTS • Snacking shortly after meals may be more fattening than the extra intake later. • That proposal was supported by theoretical calculations of gastric emptying. • Hence the timing of energy intake away from meals seems critical to overweight. • The eater's own concept of a meal is key to research on snacks in weight control. ABSTRACT. I...

This research placement designed sets of multifactorial vignettes to measure the contents of an individual's attention when recalling a helpful act. In psychometrics, altruism is typically studied as a personality trait. In reality, however, the mental structure of helping behaviour is influenced by environmental factors. The aim of the placement,...

Among the early indications of the existence of supertasters, tasters and non-tasters was a trimodal distribution of sensitivities to the taste of low concentrations of caffeine in water. A similar three peaks of prevalence have now been seen in the concentration of caffeine in the individual’s usual coffee drink that is perceived as the most prefe...

The full paper (pages 485-511) presents an innovative theory of perception of multiple features across and within modalities. Each aspect of the theory is illustrated by data from diverse experiments. The basic mechanism proposed is the individual's comparison of a template or norm of previously configured features with the exemplar of an object in...

The five papers in this special section of Appetite seem to agree that augmentation of satiety at an unspecified delay by use of a medication or food product in an indeterminate context provides no assurance that the substance contributes to reduction of obesity. Rather, satiety that slims is a specific pattern of eating that reduces the rate of en...

This paper (Fig 10 Erratum, p639) presents an innovative theory of perception of multiple features across and within modalities. Each aspect of the theory is illustrated by data from diverse experiments. The basic mechanism proposed is that an individual compares the exemplar of an object in a situation with the template or norm of previously confi...

The panda "eats, shoots & leaves." For people, there's a bit more to eating! The influences on eating are in the environment, as is the taking (or refusing) of a mouthful of a food selected from what's available. Those sensory, social and somatic influences affect eating though cognitive MEDIATION. There are a small number of fundamental cognitive...

Theory and data on mental integration of influences on the choice of the next mouthful while eating (sketched in ten slides)

The recall of personal experiences relevant to a claim of food allergy or food intolerance is assessed by a psychologically validated tool for evidence that the suspected food could have caused the adverse symptom suffered. The tool looks at recall from memory of a particular episode or episodes when food was followed by symptoms resulting in self-...

This paper illustrates how perception is achieved through interactions among the psychophysical functions of judged features of an object. The theory is that the perceiver places processed features in a multidimensional space of discriminal processes. Each dimension is scaled in units of discrimination performance. The zero coordinate of each featu...

This study started to characterise the cognitive processes by which physical effects on the senses are transformed into quantitative judgments about conceptualised aspects of a food. Using words provided by assessors, discriminations of a shortbread biscuit's fracturing patterns during eating from each assessor's internal norm were measured for the...

Associative conditioning of satiety indicates that concentrated maltodextrin (cMD) may induce a mildly aversive visceral signal within 20 min of its ingestion, as well as satiating normally. Individuals' awareness of this adverse state was tested on ratings of statistically distinct descriptions of factors liable to suppress hunger, whether distres...

This paper argues that the rise in obesity can be slowed only by universal education based on a type of evidence that does not yet exist. On top of literacy and numeracy, people need the ability to preempt the fattening effect of a decrease in habitual physical activity by altering familiar patterns of eating, drinking and exercise in ways that are...

This study investigated the thinking processes in an individual’s empathy and helping behaviour. In particular, the aim was to test for consistency within participants in addition to diversity in structure of their dispositions to donate in response to a personal appeal, using responses to a set of multi-factorial written vignettes. Computer progra...

This short overview considers a prospect that claims to boost satiety are used to prescribe or sell materials to dieters that do not slow their daily rate of energy intake, thereby worsening their problems with body weight and even perhaps increasing the prevalence of obesity. Implying that a drug or a food contributes to weight control by providin...

This brief report presents illustrative findings from the first implementation for recognition of an aroma of individualised analysis of cognition as normed discriminations. Two assessors compared mixtures of four odorants with a fresh strawberry in overall aroma, its intensity and balance, and in the smell of each odorant conceptualised in their o...

In this study, we separated for the first time the learned liking for a particular level of sweetness in a familiar drink from the infantile delight in sweetness as such ("the sweeter, the better"). It is widely assumed that sensing a liked food or drink evokes a pleasurable experience, but the only psychological evidence for this assumption has be...

This paper uses an innovative analysis of an individual"s cognitive processes to investigate a real-life example of processing rendered subconcious by a mask that shared characteristics with the varied feature. In about half the participants, integrative performance on the object was better than analytical performance on the feature. The cognitive...

We present the first experiment that was based on a novel analysis of the mental processes of choice. Sensed material characteristics such as the sweetness of a drink and symbolic attributes such as the source of sweetness stated on the label are put into the same units of influence on the response. Most users of low-calorie drinks thought about th...

The hypothesis is that energy-containing drinks and foods (including sugar-sweetened beverages) consumed more than about an hour before of a meal or snack (back to an energy-rich dessert in the previous meal) - NOT 'snacks' - are less well compensated by reduction in subsequent amounts eaten. The physiological mechanism proposed is mixing of the ex...

Fatigue is a prominent symptom in many rheumatic diseases and has a substantial impact on many outcomes. In previous research, fatigue has been linked with poor sleep and discomfort, including joint pain and sicca symptoms. The aim of the present study was to investigate prospectively the daily variations in fatigue and the roles of discomfort and...

[This is a re-revised version (4) in 2010 of the Working Paper originally circulated to colleagues in 2009. The date 2013 given on Research Gate was when that MS was copyrighted for mounting online.] *Abstract* This paper presents the simplest known theory of processes involved in a person’s unconscious and conscious achievements such as intendin...

The current strength of a person's appetite for food can be observed in any graded expression of the disposition to take a mouthful of food. For this quantitative judgment to measure an influence on hunger/satiety, however, the source of that influence has to be varied independently of other influences at the moment the rating is made.

Investigators of appetite for food have been tricked into the twin illusions that ratings of the disposition to eat are subjective and amounts eaten at meals are objective. The reality is the opposite. Making a mark on a continuous or broken line specified by two levels of what the rater uses as a single concept is the objective performance of a qu...

The first issue of Appetite was in early 1980. Hence the start of 2010 is a good time to examine the long-term impact of the journal. This editorial focuses on purely numerical indicators from the citing of the papers that have been published during the intervening 30 years.

Many experiments on the role of learning in the amount eaten at a distinctive test meal have been claimed to observe "conditioned satiety." None published from outside this author's group has used either the necessary design of the contingencies to be learnt or the measurements that distinguish a sating effect from other loss of interest in food. O...

Several recent experiments have provided evidence that the ingestion of a distinctive food by rats can be a learnt instrumental act as well as an associatively conditioned reaction. In the previous work, maintenance food was withheld for shorter and longer durations on different days following access to the training food. Extra eating before the lo...

We hypothesised that living with type 2 diabetes would enhance responses to pictures of foods in brain regions known to be involved in learnt food sensory motivation and that these stronger activations would relate to scores for dietary adherence in diabetes and to measures of potential difficulties in adherence. We compared brain responses to food...

Habits and eating occasions form a complex network: the same feature of an eating occasion can fit more than one habit and also each of the different features of the occasion can fit either the same habit or different habits. The habits that had the same two eating occasions in common were included both in habits within a same factor and in habits...

As reviewed by [Cooper, S. J. (2008). From Claude Bernard to Walter Cannon: emergence of the concept of homeostasis. Appetite 51, 419-27.] Claude Bernard's idea of stabilisation of bodily states, as realised in Walter B. Cannon's conception of homeostasis, took mathematical form during the 1940s in the principle that externally originating disturba...

Appetite ‘‘specialises in cross-disciplinary communication,’’ as stated in the aims at the start of the Guide to Authors (at http:// www.elsevier.com/locate/appet). The journal has always been open to any empirical discipline, ranging from the biological, psychological and social sciences to history and cultural studies, and to the many areas of e...

Fatigue is a systemic feeling of exhaustion that is a common symptom of many chronic illnesses, including the autoimmune inflammatory disease rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We examined predictors of levels of fatigue among people with RA using Leventhal's Common-Sense Model (CSM), which states that cognitive representations of an illness spur (or halt)...

The poster begins with a sample of published data on food-discriminative anticipatory eating in rats and continues with an extension of that design of experiment, to test for human learning of anticipatory eating without awareness of the associative contingencies (a design also published in Booth, Jarvandi & Thibault 2012 Food after deprivation rew...

Background: Fatigue is common in both Sjögren's syndrome (SS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and can restrict functioning. Aims: We tested the convergent validity of the Profile of Fatigue (ProF) using the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory (MFI) in SS and RA. Methods: The 16-item ProF and the 20-item MFI were completed by 82 White-British women age...

Types of sensory receptor can only be identified by multidimensional discrimination of a familiar version of a sensed object from variants that disconfound putative types. By that criterion, there is as yet no evidence against just the four classic types of gustatory receptor, for sodium salts, alkaloids, sugars, and proton donors.

Anticipatory hunger is a learnt increase in intake of food having a flavour or texture that predicts a long fast. This learning was studied in rats trained on a single food or a choice between protein-rich and carbohydrate-rich foods, presented for 1.5 h after 3 h without maintenance food at the start of the dark phase. Eight training cycles provid...

It is immensely satisfying to a biosocial psychologist to find that a postdoctoral career spent mostly on trying to understand the causes and consequences of patterns of eating has supported the ancient understanding of human life as a unity across our personal, cultural and biological aspects, while at the same time finding rich affinities with th...

Using the transactional model of stress and coping, the present study investigated whether specific coping resources act as buffers of the relationship between perceived stress and psychological well-being among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. A longitudinal observational study was carried out with assessments at baseline, 6 months and 1 year....