Katrijn Houben

Maastricht University | UM · Department of Clinical Psychological Science

Palatable, unhealthy food stimuli can be devalued via Go/No-Go (GNG) training that consistently pairs such stimuli with motor inhibition. However, it remains unclear whether this devaluation is caused via learned associations with motor inhibition or via inferential learning based on the valence of emitted motor responses. The present research dise...

Evaluations and intake of unhealthy, palatable food can be targeted via motor response training procedures such as Go/No-Go training (GNG) and Approach-Avoidance training. While evidence especially supports the effectiveness of GNG in changing food intake, both tasks seem to affect evaluations of trained stimuli. Associative accounts explain this d...

This study examined psychopathological correlates of implicit and explicit shame and guilt in 30 clinical and 129 non-clinical youths aged 8–17 years. Shame and guilt were measured explicitly via two self-reports and a parent report, and implicitly by means of an Implicit Association Test (IAT), while a wide range of psychopathological symptoms wer...

Background Cognitive impairment (CI) is highly prevalent in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with a sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy diet and increased cognitive stress susceptibility. Enhancement of cognitive performance by working memory training (WMT) may reverse these effects. Therefore, this study aimed to investiga...

Nearly 70% of Americans are overweight, in large part because of overconsumption of high-calorie foods such as sweets. Reducing sweets is difficult because powerful drives toward reward overwhelm inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to withhold a prepotent response) capacities. Computerized inhibitory control trainings (ICTs) have shown positive o...

Background General cognitive impairment is highly prevalent in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Domain-specific cognitive impairments include deficits in working memory (WM), cognitive flexibility, verbal memory, planning and psychomotor speed. These impairments may be associated with poor health behaviours, such as a sed...

Background General cognitive impairment is highly prevalent in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Domain-specific cognitive impairments include deficits in working memory (WM), cognitive flexibility, verbal memory, planning and psychomotor speed. These impairments may be associated with poor health behaviours, such as a sed...

Selective or picky eating can be an obstacle for a varied diet. One reason why people reject certain foods is because they do not like the texture. Several studies show that in children tactile sensitivity is related to pickiness in eating. Children who do not like the feel of sand or of slimy substances with their hands also reject more kinds of f...

Background and Objectives: Addictive behaviors are influenced both by impulsive processes headed toward consumption, and by higher-order, reflective, control-oriented processes. Our objective here was to (i) change automatically-activated action tendencies and explicit attitudes toward alcohol and softdrinks, as well as fat and healthy food through...

Background and objectives: Learning models of overeating predict that exposure therapy is effective in reducing food cue reactivity and overeating. This pilot study tested an eight-session exposure therapy aimed at inhibitory learning vs. an active control condition aimed at lifestyle improvement for obesity (treatment-as-usual). Main outcomes are...

Obesity rates are rising worldwide. Executive function and delay discounting have been hypothesized to play important roles in the self-regulation of behavior, and may explain variance in weight loss treatment success. First, we compared individuals with obesity (n = 82) to healthy weight controls (n = 71) on behavioral and self-report measures of...

A virtual shopping task was employed to illuminate why women who intend to shop healthily are differentially successful in doing so. Female undergraduates (N = 68) performed a modified approach and avoidance task that employed food items differing in healthiness and tastiness, and yielded relative speed to select and reject food items in a stylised...

Consistently inhibiting responses to palatable food stimuli increases motor suppression for those stimuli and reduces their hedonic value, suggesting a close link between motor inhibition and food reward. The current study aimed to investigate whether GNG training also reduces the motivational, reinforcing value of palatable, high-calorie food. Par...

Aims: Controlling food intake despite adequate knowledge remains a struggle for many people with type 2 diabetes. The present study investigated whether working memory training can reduce food intake and improve glycaemic control. It also examined training effects on cognition, food cravings, and dietary self-efficacy and self-care. Methods: In...

Rationale: Deficient inhibitory control is predictive of increased alcohol consumption in the laboratory; however, little is known about this relationship in naturalistic, real-world settings. Objectives: In the present study, we implemented ecological momentary assessment methods to investigate the relationship between inhibitory control and al...

Objective: We conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the effects of three types of Internet-delivered Inhibitory Control Training (ICT) with each other and with an active control intervention on alcohol consumption in a community sample of problem drinkers. Method: Two hundred and 46 heavy drinkers, who were motivated to reduce their...

In the present we study investigated whether addition of a Go/No Go training enhanced the effects of food cue exposure. We assessed desire to eat, salivation, CS-US expectancies, and eating in the absence of hunger (EAH) during and after cue exposure. Participants (N = 71) were chocolate-loving female students who tried to eat less chocolate in dai...

Working Memory (WM) plays a crucial role in successful self-regulation of behavior, including weight regulation. Improving WM might therefore be a promising strategy to support weight loss. In the present study, overweight individuals with a desire to lose weight (N = 91) received an online lifestyle intervention, in conjunction with either 25 sess...

Background: Disinhibition is apparent in users of many substances, including heavy drinkers. Previous research has shown that brief training to improve inhibitory control is associated with reduced alcohol consumption. We investigated whether a new form of inhibitory training would produce greater reductions, relative to a carefully designed contr...

In this study, it was examined whether overweight is associated with food-related obsessions and compulsions. Participants with a healthy weight (n = 27) and participants who were overweight (n = 33) filled out the Yale-Brown-Cornell Eating Disorder Scale, the Eating Obsessive-Compulsive Scale, and the Emotional and Behavioral Reactions to Intrusio...

Working memory (WM), important for driving, declines with age. It was investigated whether a WM training would enhance aspects of cognitive ability and driving ability of older drivers. Thirty-eight drivers (mean age 71 years) were randomly assigned to an adaptive WM training (n = 19) or a non-adaptive WM training (n = 19). In addition, a no-traini...

Working memory (WM) plays a critical role in cognitive control by shielding self-regulatory goals from distraction by desire-related thoughts and emotions. This study examined whether training WM increases self-regulation in overweight participants. It was hypothesized that WM training would decrease psychopathological eating-related thoughts, (ove...

Change your lifestyle: decrease your energy intake and increase your energy expenditure, is what obesity experts tell people who need to lose weight. Though the advice might be correct, it appears to be extremely difficult to change one’s lifestyle. Unhealthy habits usually are ingrained and hard to change, especially for people with an “obese cogn...

Background While the automatic processing of alcohol-related cues by alcohol abusers is well established in experimental psychopathology approaches, the cerebral regions involved in this phenomenon and the influence of alcohol intake on this process remain unknown. The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to investigat...

Obesity seems related to a preference for immediate gratification. By changing this focus on short term benefits to a more future-oriented outlook, delay discounting (impulsive decision making) can be changed by a manipulation of episodic future thinking (EFT). EFT comprises a vivid mental simulation of general future experiences. EFT may also affe...

Dietary self-care is a key element of self-management in type 2 diabetes. It is also the most difficult aspect of diabetes self-management. Adhering to long-term dietary goals and resisting immediate food desires requires top-down inhibitory control over subcortical impulsive and emotional responses to food. Practising simple neurocognitive tasks c...

Overweight children appear to be more responsive to environmental, hedonic cues and easily overeat in the current obesogenic environment. They are also found to overeat in absence of hunger, and this overeating seems related to impulsivity: impulsive participants are more prone to external eating. However, some studies showed that impulsive adults...

Time orientation could play an important role in eating behavior. The current study investigated whether eating behavior is associated with the Consideration of Future Consequences scale (CFC). Specifically, it was examined whether unhealthy eaters consider the future less and are more concerned with immediate gratification. A related measure of ti...

Earlier research has demonstrated that food-specific inhibition training wherein food cues are repeatedly and consistently mapped onto stop signals decreases food intake and bodyweight. The mechanisms underlying these training effects, however, remain unclear. It has been suggested that consistently pairing stimuli with stop signals induces automat...

Background Problem drinkers have poor inhibitory control (disinhibition). Previous studies have demonstrated that various forms of ‘inhibition training’ can reduce alcohol consumption in the laboratory and at short-term follow-up, but their longer-term efficacy and mechanisms of action are unknown. In this phase 2 randomised controlled trial we wil...

Given the vital role of inhibitory control in successful weight management, the aim of this study was to examine whether inhibitory control can be increased via incentives. Specifically, participants were randomly assigned to two conditions: In the reward condition, participants could earn a monetary bonus by performing well during an inhibition ta...

Emotional eaters are often presumed to eat in response to negative emotions, while positive emotions have been largely neglected. The current study induced a positive, negative, or neutral mood in a student sample and subsequently measured food intake. In addition, the relation between caloric intake and mood improvement was assessed. It was expect...

In the Netherlands, a national chlamydia screening program started in 2008, but the participation was low and the screening was not cost-effective. This study aimed to explore unconscious and conscious associations with chlamydia screening (16-29 year-olds). In addition, we examined whether information presented in chlamydia screening invitation le...

Objective Consistent with the idea that impulsivity increases vulnerability to temptations of tasty high caloric food, less effective response inhibition is associated with overeating, overweight, and obesity. However, inefficient response inhibition mainly affects eating behavior when strong motivational urges to consume palatable food are simulta...

Disinhibition is present in various maladaptive behaviors, including substance use disorders. Most previous research has assumed that disinhibition is a psychological construct that is relatively stable within individuals. However, recent evidence suggests that the ability to inhibit behavior fluctuates in response to environmental and psychologica...

For many years, emotional eating has been measured by means of self-report questionnaires, which retrospectively measure eating in response to (mainly negative) emotions. However, some researchers suggest that these questionnaires may not be the best way to assess emotional eating, as people are generally not very good at recalling their emotions,...

In a previous study, restrained eaters showed stronger implicit preferences for high-caloric food compared to unrestrained eaters. Caloric density and palatability are however almost always intertwined, and it was never tested whether this high-calorie food preference of restrained eaters follows from the energy density or the palatability of high-...

As the prevalence of obesity is increasing, many people resort to dieting to achieve a healthy body weight. Such dietary restraint has been suggested to cause counterproductive effects leading to disinhibited eating. However, it is more likely that dietary restraint is a by-product of previous difficulties in weight control and disinhibited eating....

Unlabelled: Poor response inhibition has been associated with obesity, excessive food intake, and other consumptive behaviours, including alcohol use. However, the correlation between obesity and addictive behaviours like alcoholism is low: people who are obese appear to have a specific problem in restraining food intake. This would imply that obe...

  Previous research has shown that consistently not responding to alcohol-related stimuli in a go/no-go training procedure reduces drinking behaviour. This study aimed to examine further the mechanisms underlying this go/no-go training effect.   Fifty-seven heavy drinkers were assigned randomly to two training conditions: in the beer/no-go conditio...

Disgust is a core emotion that serves to protect one from engaging in activities that promote contamination and contracting disease. Since disgust is intimately connected to ingesting food, disgust sensitivity is probably also associated with dietary habits. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between obesity and disgust an...

The present study examined whether implicit measures of associations with snack foods and food consumer behaviour could be changed through a picture-picture evaluative conditioning procedure. In the experimental condition (n=41), female participants completed a conditioning procedure in which pictures of snack foods were paired with images of negat...

Alcohol abuse disrupts core executive functions, including working memory (WM)--the ability to maintain and manipulate goal-relevant information. When executive functions like WM are weakened, drinking behavior gets out of control and is guided more strongly by automatic impulses. This study investigated whether training WM restores control over dr...

In this study, we hypothesized that overweight/obese persons have an exaggerated approach tendency toward high calorie foods. Testing this hypothesis, a stimulus response compatibility (SRC) task was used to assess approach-avoidance tendencies toward food in both overweight/obese participants (n=42), and normal weight controls (n=46). The SRC task...

When inhibitory control is lacking, people are more prone to indulge in high calorie food. This research examined whether increasing or decreasing inhibitory control influences food intake in opposite directions. In this study, baseline inhibitory control ability was measured with the Stop Signal Task. Next, participants performed a modified Stop S...

Learning to quit drinking: An impulsive and reflective route to behavioral change According to contemporary dual-process theories, alcohol misuse is the result of an imbalance between two distinct cognitive systems: An impulsive system and a reflective system. While the automatic impulsive system becomes hypersensitive to alcohol-related reward wit...

The goal of the present research was to test the value of evaluative conditioning (EC) to unobtrusively change alcohol-related attitudes and drinking behavior. In the EC paradigm, participants had to spot an irrelevant target picture in a series of trials in which many different stimuli were presented. In the experimental condition, beer-related pi...

When inhibitory control is lacking, people are more prone to indulge in high calorie food. This research examined whether training to inhibit food-related responses renders one less susceptible to temptations of high calorie food. Trait chocolate lovers were divided into three conditions: participants either consistently inhibited responding to cho...

Since implicit attitudes toward alcohol play an important role in drinking behavior, a possible way to obtain a behavioral change is changing these implicit attitudes. This study examined whether a change in implicit attitudes and in drinking behavior can be achieved via evaluative conditioning. Participants were randomly assigned to an experimenta...

Previous research showed a strong relation between response inhibition, overeating and overweight. It was shown that people with ineffective response inhibition are more susceptible to the temptations of palatable food, eat more and are more often overweight or obese. In addition the results of several studies suggest that what needs to be inhibite...

In two studies, it was examined whether dietary restraint is associated with stronger positive implicit attitudes toward high calorie food. This hypothesis was tested using unipolar IAT variants that allowed us to separately measure and examine positive and negative implicit associations with high calorie food. In both studies, results showed that...

The main aim of this study was to test whether automatic action-tendencies to approach alcohol can be modified, and whether this affects drinking behaviour. Forty-two hazardous drinkers were assigned randomly to a condition in which they were implicitly trained to avoid or to approach alcohol, using a training variety of the alcohol Approach Avoida...

Cannabis use is common in patients with recent-onset schizophrenia and this is associated with poor disease outcome. More insight in the cognitive-motivational processes related to cannabis use in schizophrenia may inform treatment strategies. The present study is the first known to compare implicit and explicit cannabis associations in individuals...

Dual-process models propose that addictive behaviors are determined by an implicit, impulsive system and an explicit, reflective system. Consistent with these models, research has demonstrated implicit affective associations with alcohol, using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), that predict unique variance in drinking behavior above explicit cog...

Previous studies demonstrated that positive implicit attitudes toward alcohol, assessed with unipolar Implicit Association Tests (IATs), are related to drinking behaviour while negative implicit alcohol attitudes are not. However, because the IAT is a relative measure, the present study aimed at replicating these findings with non-relative unipolar...

This study tested a hypothesis derived from recent dual-process models, which conceptualize behavior as the interplay of associative and Executive Control (EC) processes. This general logic was applied here to the phenomenon of aggressiveness after drinking alcohol. Specifically, we predicted that automatic associations between alcohol and power wo...

Recently, a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the IAT-RF (IAT-Recoding Free) was developed which prevents recoding processes by switching response assignments randomly between trials rather than between blocks. In this study, the IAT-RF was used to measure and examine the predictive validity of recoding-free implicit alcohol...

Contemporary dual-process models of alcohol abuse propose that alcohol abuse develops because of dysfunctions in the impulsive system, which generates automatic impulses to drink alcohol, and disruptions in the reflective system, which becomes unable to inhibit the influence of these automatic impulses. Based on these insights, this study investiga...

conference paper

Given the potential advantages of online assessment of implicit alcohol-related cognitive processes, the goal of this study was to empirically validate the online administration of the implicit association test (IAT). First, we examined whether an Internet-delivered IAT programmed in Flash can be as effectively used to assess implicit alcohol-relat...

Research using unipolar Implicit Association Tests (IATs) demonstrated that positive but not negative implicit alcohol associations are related to drinking behavior. However, the relative nature of the IAT with respect to target concepts (i.e., alcohol vs. soft drinks) obscures the interpretation of IAT scores and their relationship to behavior. He...

Research aimed at uncovering implicit cognitive processes involved in alcohol use and abuse has demonstrated that implicit attitudes toward alcohol are negative and unrelated to drinking behavior. Here, it was examined whether these findings could be due to contamination of the IAT by extrapersonal associations that are irrelevant to behavior. Part...

Implicit and explicit cocaine-related cognitions were assessed in a sample of 16 cocaine-dependent poly-substance abusers and 16 age, gender, and SES-matched controls. Implicit associations were assessed with four unipolar versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), assessing associations between cocaine and positive affect, negative affect, a...

The advent of indirect measures, such as the Implicit Association test (IAT), has stimulated interest in implicit cognitions that may automatically steer addictive behaviours such as alcohol abuse. Counter-intuitively, recent IAT research has demonstrated that alcohol is implicitly associated with negative valence, regardless of the level of alcoho...

Studies using bipolar Implicit Association Tests (IATs) found that heavy drinkers have negative and arousal associations with alcohol relative to soda. Study 1 examined whether these results were due to the label 'alcohol' and the choice of the contrast category 'soda'. Four unipolar IATs assessed alcohol associations with positive and negative val...

K. Rothermund and D. Wentura (2004) showed how Figure-Ground (FG) asymmetries produce effects on the Implicit Association Task (IAT), independent of associations. Here, the FG account was tested for the robust finding that drinkers show a negative alcohol-IAT effect while being positive on explicit measures. FG asymmetries were manipulated through...

Explicit measures revealed three basic types of alcohol-related cognitions: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement (relief), and negative expectancies. Using the same typology, we review studies assessing alcohol-related cognitions with implicit measures. Most research focused on automatic appetitive responses (positive reinforcement). The...

This chapter provides an overview of indirect RT measures of implicit associations, including the IAT, the EAST, and priming paradigms. Each indirect measure is described on a conceptual level and is illustrated with recent findings from addiction research. For each measure, a critical evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses is given including a...

Boundary extension is the tendency to remember more of a scene than was actually shown. The dominant interpretation of this memory illusion is that it originates from schemata that people construct when viewing a scene. Evidence of boundary extension has been obtained primarily with adult participants who remember neutral pictures. The current stud...

This chapter provides an overview of indirect RT measures of implicit associations, including the IAT, the EAST, and priming paradigms. Each indirect measure is described on a conceptual level and is illustrated with recent findings from addiction research. For each measure, a critical evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses is given including a...