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Understanding influences on consumers’ dietary stress in healthy food buying
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate relationships among body mass index (BMI), socioeconomic variables, dietary self-efficacy and consumer dietary stress in healthy food buying and explore whether different levels of personal values influence these relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on an online representative cross-sectional study with 380 food consumers. Structural equation modeling served to estimate direct, mediating and moderating effects between the studied constructs and variables.
Findings
Examples of moderating and moderated mediating effects include a negative impact of BMI on dietary stress for consumers with low levels of enjoyment value but no significant effect for consumers with high levels of enjoyment. BMI also had a greater negative impact on dietary self-efficacy when the level of respect/achievement was high (vs low), and respect/achievement positively moderated the mediating effect of BMI on dietary stress through dietary self-efficacy.
Research limitations/implications
This study focuses on analyzing healthy food buying in a particular cultural setting and may suffer from a lack of generalizability to other cultures. The results suggest that research should take into account personal values when investigating stress.
Practical implications
Food managers and health authorities can improve their ability to reduce dietary stress when addressing consumers by understanding the role of personal values in healthy food choice and the impact on mental well-being.
Originality/value
This study offers a novel, more fine-grained conceptual model of how consumers develop dietary stress when buying healthy food.
... Additionally, studies indicate that there may be differences between genders in food preferences [25,26], eating behaviors [27,28], and emotional reactions [29][30][31]. However, according to our knowledge, no previous studies have holistically explored potential gender-specific reactions to tempting food cues by simultaneously investigating emotions, perceived dietary quality, and future willingness to eat (WtE). ...
... The individual dimension reflects individual autonomy and preferences and is related to individual variables such as gender, age, and educational level; personal choices; emotions; knowledge; values; and attitudes about food. For instance, Hansen and Thomsen [28] found that women have a higher level of dietary self-efficacy than men and are more likely to show dietary stress. Also, personal values, such as environmental consciousness and health priorities, may be related to food behaviors. ...
Individuals frequently encounter alluring food temptations that can disrupt their efforts to follow a healthy diet. These temptations may trigger pleasurable thoughts and sensations, potentially leading to unhealthy eating habits and obesity, which misalign with the goals of sustainable food systems to promote overall well-being. However, there is limited knowledge regarding how individual differences such as gender and motivation for healthy eating might impact individuals’ responses to unhealthy food temptations. In an experimental investigation, 245 participants were exposed to a tasty but low-nutrient food product (potato crisps). The results provide several new insights: (a) when individuals’ motivation for healthy eating is low, pleasurable experiences have a positive impact on perceived dietary quality; (b) pleasurable feelings also directly reduce willingness to consume potato crisps; (c) gender influences the relationship between pleasure-feeling and willingness to eat, with a negative relationship for women and a non-significant relationship for men; and (d) among women, there is a positive relationship between arousal and willingness to eat, while this relationship is non-significant for men. This study adds to the body of knowledge already available on food temptations, nutrition, and sustainable eating.
Purpose
Consumer food behavior has received considerable attention from marketers, researchers and regulators. With the rising obesity epidemic worldwide, the existing literature and previous reviews provide a limited understanding of consumers’ unhealthy food choices. To address this gap, this study aims to investigate consumer psychology for food choices in terms of mental processes and behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
This systematic literature review analyzed 84 research papers accessed from the Web of Science database and selected high-quality marketing journals. A detailed analysis identified themes arranged in an organizing framework. Gaps, limitations, convergence and ambivalent findings were noted to derive future research directions.
Findings
Major themes in the literature include food marketers’ actions (food stimuli and context), environmental influence (micro and macro) and consumer psychology and personal factors, leading to food choice related decisions. The antecedents and consequences of food choice healthiness are summarized. Several studies converged on the benefits of health motivations and goals, food literacy and customizing meals bottom-up on food choice healthiness.
Research limitations/implications
This review helps researchers gain state-of-the-art understanding on consumer psychology for food choices. It presents ambivalent and converging findings, gaps and limitations of extant research to inform researchers about issues that need to be addressed in the literature. This review presents future research questions to guide research on critical issues. This literature review contributes to marketing domain literature on consumer’s food well-being and overall well-being.
Practical implications
This review offers actionable insights for food marketers, policymakers and nongovernmental organizations to drive consumer demand for healthier foods, focusing on food labeling, food environment, message framing and raising consumer awareness.
Originality/value
This review offers current understanding of consumer psychology for food choices focusing on healthiness, an aspect lacking in previous literature reviews.
Sustainability is one of the major challenges that societies are facing. The question of why and how consumer food sustainability related issues (e.g., food waste, sustainable food shopping behavior, among others) are placed on the public agenda is therefore of high interest to food policy makers. Drawing from media agenda setting theory, this study provides the first analysis of how relationships between consumer food sustainability-related frames appear in the media. Focusing on the COVID-19 crisis, it is examined how the media framed food sustainability issues in 2019 and 2020. 271 newspaper stories are investigated through a rather new approach to quantitative content analysis that incorporated binary coding, optimal scaling, and path analysis. The study’s findings point to various significant relationships between frame contents and implications and similarly bring to light the moderating effects of the COVID-19 crisis and ‘article authorship’ on a number of these relationships. The findings contribute to the understanding of how public opinion regarding food sustainability develops and can help food policymakers and authorities seeking to develop, position, and address issues relevant to food sustainability.
Poor food literacy behaviours may contribute to food insecurity in developed countries. The aim of this research was to describe the apparent prevalence of food insecurity in adults at enrolment in a food literacy program and to examine the relationship between food insecurity and a range of independent variables. Individuals attending the Food Sensations® for Adults program in Western Australia from May 2016 to April 2018 completed a pre-program questionnaire (n = 1433) indicating if they had run of money for food in the past month (food insecurity indicator), frequency of food literacy behaviours, selected dietary behaviours, and demographic characteristics. The level of food insecurity reported by participants (n = 1379) was 40.5%. Results from multiple logistic regression demonstrated that behaviours related to planning and management, shopping, preparation, and cooking were all statistically independently associated with food insecurity, in addition to soft/soda drink consumption, education, employment status, and being born in Australia. The results are salient as they indicate an association between food literacy and food insecurity. The implications are that food insecure participants may respond differently to food literacy programs. It may be necessary to screen people enrolling in programs, tailor program content, and include comprehensive measures in evaluation to determine effect on the impact of food literacy programs on different subgroups.
Purpose – Research on sustainable consumption (SC) has shown how, faced with barriers that prevent them
from embracing a sustainable lifestyle, consumers experience classic symptoms of distress. Although distress
emerges as a constitutive dimension of sustainable lifestyles, research has not yet provided a comprehensive
account of how consumers cope with it. This paper aims to provide such an account.
Design/methodology/approach – In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 people who defined
themselves as sustainable consumers. A hermeneutic approach was adopted for the analysis.
Findings – The analysis shows that consumers enact two different coping strategies: adjustment or
episodic coping and structural coping or deradicalization. Both sets encompass reappraisals and meaningmaking
strategies to maintain motivation while simultaneously appeasing tensions. They also comprise the
strategic enactment of emotions to energize the self and/or to appease distress. Coping influences how SC is
appraised and lived, as these practices are dynamically changed to navigate structural constraints.
Practical implications – SC campaigns have traditionally focused on cognitive empowerment. However,
the evidence suggests that emotional empowerment could be a more effective way to promote the practice.
Originality/value – This paper provides the first in-depth examination of the strategies adopted to cope
with distress. The analysis shows that consumers reconfigure how SC is appraised and implemented, while
emphasizing the crucial role of emotion work in the coping repertoire. Although SC is stressful due to
structural and social constraints, consumers are able to remain committed to it to varying degrees.
With increasing rates of obesity in the United States, attention to life chances and psychological consequences associated with weight stigma and weight-based discrimination has also intensified. While research has demonstrated the negative effects of weight-based discrimination on mental health, little is known about whether different social groups are disproportionately vulnerable to these experiences. Drawing on the modified labelling theory, the focus of this paper is to investigate the psychological correlates of body weight and self-perceived weight-based discrimination among American women at the intersection of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES). Analyses use data from the National Health Measurement Study (NHMS), a national multi-stage probability sample of non-institutional, English-speaking adults, ages 35 to 89 in 2005–2006. Our findings demonstrate that the effect of weight-based discrimination on psychological well-being is highly contingent on social status. Specifically, the psychological consequences of discrimination on Hispanic women and women in the lowest household income group is significantly greater relative to White women and women with higher household income, controlling for obesity status and self-rated health. These results suggest that higher social status has a buffering effect of weight stigma on psychological well-being.
Presents an integrative theoretical framework to explain and to predict psychological changes achieved by different modes of treatment. This theory states that psychological procedures, whatever their form, alter the level and strength of self-efficacy. It is hypothesized that expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. Persistence in activities that are subjectively threatening but in fact relatively safe produces, through experiences of mastery, further enhancement of self-efficacy and corresponding reductions in defensive behavior. In the proposed model, expectations of personal efficacy are derived from 4 principal sources of information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. Factors influencing the cognitive processing of efficacy information arise from enactive, vicarious, exhortative, and emotive sources. The differential power of diverse therapeutic procedures is analyzed in terms of the postulated cognitive mechanism of operation. Findings are reported from microanalyses of enactive, vicarious, and emotive modes of treatment that support the hypothesized relationship between perceived self-efficacy and behavioral changes. (21/2 p ref)
This article explores how economic inequality in the United States has led to growing levels of poverty, food insecurity, and obesity for the bottom segments of the economy. It takes the position that access to nutritious food is a requirement for living and for participating fully in the workplace and society. Because of increasing economic inequality in the United States, growing segments of the U.S. economy have become more food insecure and obese, eating unhealthy food for survival and suffering an erosion of “equality of capabilities” that undermines their ability to play a “full and active part in the functioning of (their) community.” Unequal access to nutritious foods in the United States is attributable in part to an industrial food system that is designed to produce short-term profits for industrial food producers, processors, and distributors that extract surplus labor value through market concentration and opportunistic behavior at the expense of the long-term benefits for consumers, food workers (including farmers), and ecosystems. Economic inequality, food insecurity, and the erosion of equality of capabilities in the United States have given rise to protest movements, social movements, social innovations, and some modest strengthening of regulations to make access to and consumption of healthy food a right for every person. Implications for business and society research are explored.
In examining how stress influences consumer saving and spending, the authors propose that consumers who experience a stressful situation allocate their resources strategically to gain control of their environment. A series of studies shows that this strategic allocation of resources occurs in two ways. Consumers experiencing stress may show increased saving behavior, which assures them that monetary resources will be available when needed. Alternatively, consumers experiencing stress may show increased spending behavior, directed specifically toward products that the consumer perceives to be necessities and that allow for control in an otherwise uncontrollable environment. This conceptualization and the related findings can inform assessments of when stress will lead to beneficial or impulsive consumer behaviors.
The call for business practices that create benefits for companies, customers, and society is getting louder. This article analyzes a new implementation of such a win–win–win approach: the carrotmob. Activists and managers jointly organize a shopping flashmob in which consumers collectively purchase the products of a target company to reward its intent to act more socially responsible. Given that carrotmobs are only efficient if they are supported by a critical mass of consumers, a survey study of 337 young consumers explores the critical drivers of carrotmob participation. Accordingly, object-oriented, personal, and social motives jointly determine carrotmob participation with social motives having the strongest impact.
We explored the hypothesis that perceptions of overweight vary in accord with the prevalence of overweight in specific populations. The present study investigated this relationship in samples from diverse groups in the US and four other countries. The perceptual threshold for overweight is the scalar point at which individuals determine the transition from normal to overweight. Perceptual thresholds for overweight were obtained from 812 adults in Korea, Mexico, Ukraine, Tanzania, and the US (Black, Hispanic, White and college student samples). A linear relationship was observed between the perceptual threshold for overweight and the population prevalence (r=0.52, adjusted R(2)=0.22, F (1/15)=5.24, p<.05), and this relationship was considerably stronger in the non-US samples. This finding links with the results of other studies documenting the influence of the social environment on both weight perception and weight transmission. Together, they suggest that the socio-cultural milieu and weight norms are components of the obesogenic environment and argue for the inclusion of weight norm interventions in weight management programs and public health initiatives.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article reviews the evolution of almost 25 years of public service motivation research in order to identify what is necessary to raise future research to a higher level. First, we look at the rise in public service motivation research and try to provide an explanation for the increasing number of publications. Second, we review the empirical research on public service motivation and summarize the knowledge that has been built up so far in terms of the nature of the concept and its prevalence, its antecedents, and its consequences or outcomes. Third, we identify the challenges which future research is likely to face and we develop a strategy to address the aforementioned issues. In doing so, we aim to provide a roadmap for future research and thus contribute to a further increase in more robust knowledge on a topic that has been increasingly influential in public administration and public management.
This study investigates the influence of values on the particular behavior of television viewing, but within the context of other variables, specifically, the demographic variables of gender, age, income, and education. Using a path analytic framework, this study supports the position that the relationship of values to behaviors needs to be investigated in the context of other relevant variables; findings of studies investigating the simple bivariate relationships of values and behavior can be misleading. In this study, the inclusion of the direct relationships between demographics and behaviors in the model reduced some effects of values on television viewing to nonsignificance, but also revealed significant values—viewing relationships that had appeared to be nonsignificant when the direct effects of demographics were excluded from the model. Discussion addresses the implications of the model for values research and the relationship of values to television viewing behavior. Implications for segmentation and targeting are also discussed.
Corporate responsibility for consumption-related issues has been on the business ethics agenda for several decades. However, some recent consumption-related issues, such as obesity, differ qualitatively from the traditional product liability cases. This study proposes an alternative responsibility concept, referred to as the social connection corporate responsibility (CR). A detailed conceptualization of the social connection CR is presented and subsequently contrasted with the liability approach to CR. Then, a social connection logic to the case of obesity is applied, followed by an examination of how fast-food chains are socially connected to obesity and of what kind of responsibilities such a social connection implies.
This article explores cross-sectional associations between depressive symptoms and body mass index (BMI) in women working in schools in the Greater New Orleans area. Self-efficacy for eating and exercise, eating styles, and exercise are examined as potential pathways. This is a secondary data analysis of 743 women who were participating in a workplace wellness randomized controlled trial to address environmental factors influencing eating and exercise behaviors using baseline data prior to the intervention. BMI was the primary outcome examined. Path analysis suggested that increased depressive symptoms were associated with increased BMI in women. Indirect effects of depressive symptoms on BMI were found for increased healthy eating self-efficacy, increased emotional eating, and decreased exercise self-efficacy. The association between greater healthy eating self efficacy and BMI was unexpected, and may indicate a suppressor effect of eating self-efficacy in the relationship between depressive symptoms and BMI in women. The findings suggest the importance of depressive symptoms to BMI in women. Targets for interventions to reduce BMI include targeting depressive symptoms and related sequelae including self-efficacy for exercise, and emotional eating. Further investigation of eating self-efficacy and BMI are recommended with particular attention to both efficacy for health eating and avoidance of unhealthy foods.
This article reviews the social origins of students' development of self-regulatory skill with special emphasis on observational learning through modeling. A social cognitive perspective on self-regulation is presented. In this view, students' academic competence develops initially from social sources of academic skill and subsequently shifts to self sources in a series of 4 levels: observational, imitative, self-controlled, and self-regulated. The effects of models on observers depend in part on perceptions of self-efficacy, or beliefs about one's capabilities to learn or perform designated behaviors. Research on social influences is reviewed, and includes factors such as cognitive modeling, coping and mastery models, self-modeling, learning goals, and progress feedback. Related theoretical perspectives are discussed along with suggestions for future research.
The DASS-21 is a well-established instrument for measuring depression, anxiety, and stress with good reliability and validity reported from Hispanic American, British, and Australian adults. However, the lack of appropriate validation among Asian populations continues to pose concerns over the use of DASS-21 in Asian samples. Cultural variation may influence the individual's experience and emotional expression. Thus, when researchers and practitioners employ Western-based assessments with Asian populations by directly translating them without an appropriate validation, the process can be challenging. We conducted a series of rigorous statistical tests and minimized any potential confounds from the demographic information. Following factor analyses, we performed multigroup analysis across six nations to demonstrate consistency of our findings. The advantages of this revised DASS-18 stress scale are twofold. First, it possesses fewer items, which results in a cleaner factorial structure. Second, it has a smaller interfactor correlation. With these justifications, the revised DASS-18 stress scale is potentially more suitable for Asian populations. Nonetheless, given limitations, findings should be considered preliminary.
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the effect of anxiety on information search during food choice and to test a key moderator of the effect of anxiety on search, namely attitude towards nutritional claims.
Design/methodology/approach
By means of qualitative study the paper investigates the notion that consumers experience anxiety about health outcomes during food choice. Further, by means of structural equation modelling based on two studies with representative samples of Danish consumers, the paper investigates the effects outlined above.
Findings
The authors show that anxiety during food choice increases information search in four product categories – ready dinner meals, salad dressing, biscuits, and cakes. Further, the results show that the positive effect of anxiety on information search is stronger when consumers have a less favourable attitude towards nutritional claims on the product label.
Practical implications
The results suggest that anxiety during food choice is desirable from the consumer welfare point of view since it leads to more informed consumers. The results also indicate that public policy makers should educate consumers to be critical about nutritional claims, since this would increase consumers' propensity to search for health information. In turn, from a managerial point of view this suggests that providers of healthy food should provide extended health information for consumers that are sceptical about nutritional claims since their scepticism towards this type of condensed information will in fact motivate extended information search.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to research in marketing on food choice and consumption: a consumption area that is important but difficult to navigate due to an increasing complexity of nutritional information at the point of sale. This paper demonstrates that situational, choice‐based anxiety and scepticism towards nutritional claims may actually be good things by prompting consumers to undertake search, and hence ultimately make more informed choices.
The present research shows in 4 studies that cognitive load can reduce the impact of temptations on cognition and behavior and, thus, challenges the proposition that distraction always hampers self-regulation. Participants performed different speeded categorization tasks with pictures of attractive and neutral food items (Studies 1-3) and attractive and unattractive female faces (Study 4), while we assessed their reaction times as an indicator of selective attention (Studies 1, 3, and 4) or as an indicator of hedonic thoughts about food (Study 2). Cognitive load was manipulated by a concurrent digit span task. Results show that participants displayed greater attention to tempting stimuli (Studies 1, 3, and 4) and activated hedonic thoughts in response to palatable food (Study 2), but high cognitive load completely eliminated these effects. Moreover, cognitive load during the exposure to attractive food reduced food cravings (Study 1) and increased healthy food choices (Study 3). Finally, individual differences in sensitivity to food temptations (Study 3) and interest in alternative relationship partners (Study 4) predicted selective attention to attractive stimuli, but again, only when cognitive load was low. Our findings suggest that recognizing the tempting value of attractive stimuli in our living environment requires cognitive resources. This has the important implication that, contrary to traditional views, performing a concurrent demanding task may actually diminish the captivating power of temptation and thus facilitate self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Theories of eating regulation often attribute overweight to a malfunction of homeostatic regulation of body weight. With the goal conflict model of eating, we present a new perspective that attributes the difficulty of chronic dieters (i.e., restrained eaters) in regulating their food intake to a conflict between 2 incompatible goals—namely, eating enjoyment and weight control. This model explains the findings of previous research and provides novel insights into the psychological mechanism responsible for both dietary failure and success. According to this model, although chronic dieters are motivated to pursue their weight control goal, they often fail in food-rich environments because they are surrounded by palatable food cues that strongly prime the goal of eating enjoyment. Due to the incompatibility of the eating enjoyment goal and the weight control goal, such increase in the activation of the eating enjoyment goal results in (a) an inhibition of the cognitive representation of the weight control goal and (b) preferential processing of palatable food stimuli. Both these processes interfere with the effective pursuit of the weight control goal and facilitate unhealthy eating. However, there is a minority of restrained eaters for whom, most likely due to past success in exerting self-control, tasty high-calorie food has become associated with weight control thoughts. For them, exposure to palatable food increases the accessibility of the weight control goal, enabling them to control their body weight in food-rich environments. Evidence for these proposed psychological mechanisms is provided, and implications for interventions are discussed.
The role of values has received limited empirical attention relative to its potential significance, especially within a causal modeling approach. A series of multivariate and structural equation analyses supported the hypotheses that values have internal and external dimensions that influence attitudes. In turn, attitudes were found to influence behaviors, as the final phase in the value-attitude-behavior hierarchy. These analyses were performed on data derived from a survey about natural food shopping. As hypothesized, we found that people who have more internally oriented and less externally oriented value structures like natural foods more than other people, and these attitudes then lead to behaviors appropriate to the structure. Theoretical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using data from 88 samples from 40 countries, the authors reevaluate the propositions of a recent values theory and provide criteria for identifying what is culture-specific in value meanings and structure. They confirm the widespread presence of 10 value types, arrayed on a motivational continuum, and organized on virtually universal, orthogonal dimensions: Openness to Change versus Conservation and Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. Forty-four values demonstrate high cross-cultural consistency of meaning. In the average sample, about 16% of single values diverge from their proto-typical value types, and one pair of motivationally close value types is intermixed. Test-retest and randomly split sample analyses reveal that some two thirds of deviations represent unreliable measurement and one third represent culture-specific characteristics. Ways to identify and interpret the latter are presented.
This article presents a theory of potentially universal aspects in the content of human values. Ten types of values are distinguished by their motivational goals. The theory also postulates a structure of relations among the value types, based on the conflicts and compatibilities experienced when pursuing them. This structure permits one to relate systems of value priorities, as an integrated whole, to other variables. A new values instrument, based on the theory and suitable for cross-cultural research, is described. Evidence relevant for assessing the theory, from 97 samples in 44 countries, is summarized. Relations of this approach to Rokeach's work on values and to other theories and research on value dimensions are discussed. Application of the approach to social issues is exemplified in the domains of politics and intergroup relations.
This research investigates the effect of activation of a negative stereotype on behaviors that are perceived to increase the chance of becoming a member of the stereotyped group. Activation of a negative stereotype (the overweight stereotype) is shown to lead to stereotype-consistent goal commitment (low health goal commitment), which partially explains increases in stereotype-conducive behavior (eating indulgent foods). Two theoretically relevant moderators are proposed and supported. Increased accessibility of the countervailing health goal and increased accessibility of the link between the behavior and membership in the stereotyped group both limit the effect of stereotype activation on stereotype-conducive behavior. Five experiments support the facilitative effect of stereotype activation on stereotype-conducive behavior, the role of goal commitment, and both moderators.
At work, at school, at the gym club, or even at home, consumers often face challenging situations in which they are motivated to perform their best. This research demonstrates that activating performance goals, whether in cognitive or physical domains, leads to an increase in the consumption of high-calorie foods at the expense of good nutrition. This effect derives from beliefs that the function of food is to provide energy for the body (food as fuel) coupled with poor nutrition literacy, leading consumers to overgeneralize the instrumental role of calories for performance. Indeed, nutrition experts choose very different foods (lower in calorie, higher in nutritional value) than lay consumers in response to performance goals. Also, performance goals no longer increase calorie intake when emphasizing the hedonic function of food (food for pleasure). Hence, while consumer research often interprets the overconsumption of pleasurable and unhealthy high-calorie foods as a consequence of hedonic goals and self-control failures, our research suggests that this overconsumption may also be explained by a maladaptive motivation to manage energy intake.
In this article, the authors explore whether choice patterns are sensitive to the potential of relevant trade-offs to elicit negative emotion. Across three experiments, decision makers increasingly use a choice strategy that maximizes quality at the expense of some currency (usually price) when the quality attribute is rated as more inherently emotion-laden (Experiment 1) or involves losses rather than gains (Experiments 2 and 3). These emotional trade-off difficulty effects on choice are obtained even after controlling for effects that are attributable to subjects’ relative importance weights for the quality versus currency attributes. A fourth experiment validates that tasks requiring losses (versus gains) on quality attributes are assessed as particularly emotion-laden by naïve subjects. Overall, it appears that coping with potentially emotion-laden choice trade-offs is one factor influencing consumer choice strategies. Thus, emotional trade-off difficulty is a factor that marketers should consider when attempting to predict and explain consumer choice patterns. These conclusions are consistent with recent research that argues that avoiding or otherwise coping with negative emotion is an important goal that guides decision behavior (e.g., Larrick 1993; Luce, Bettman, and Payne 1997; Simonson 1992).
This paper reviews the information overload controversy and presents a methodology for investigating the effects of information load on consumer decision making performance. The proposed framework enables the statistical testing of specific hypotheses and can incorporate several extensions and refinements. The methodology is illustrated by re-analyzing the published data of previous studies; some interesting findings emerge from the analysis. The paper concludes with some public policy and managerial implications of the consumer information overload concept.
The authors report the results of two studies that attempt to model antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviors in a personal selling context. They draw the antecedents from extant research and propose that the willingness to perform organizational citizenship behaviors is related to the job-related perceptions of the degree of organizational fit between the salesperson and his or her firm, level of leadership support, perceived fairness in reward allocation (i.e., distributive justice), and job satisfaction. They hypothesize and test direct and indirect relations with these constructs and organizational citizenship behaviors. Most of these relations were significant across the two studies.
Although dietary restraint has been shown to be a robust predictor of binge eating among women, many women report elevated levels of dietary restraint but do not concurrently exhibit symptoms of binge eating. Moderating variables could therefore interact with dietary restraint to affect its relation to binge eating. One potential factor that may attenuate this relationship is eating-related self-efficacy, defined as the tendency to feel confident in the ability to control eating behaviour under a diverse set of circumstances (e.g., under negative affect, social conflicts). This cross-sectional study examined whether eating-related self-efficacy moderated the relationship between flexible (i.e., a graded approach to dieting, defined by behaviour such as taking smaller servings to regulate body weight, yet still enjoying a variety of foods) and rigid restraint (i.e., an all-or-none approach to eating, characterised by inflexible diet rules) and binge eating. Data were analysed from 237 women. Greater levels of rigid restraint, flexible restraint, and a poorer self-efficacy were shown to predict unique variance in binge eating severity. A significant interaction effect was observed between flexible (but not rigid) restraint and self-efficacy scores on binge eating. Contrary to expectations, however, the flexible restraint-binge eating relationship was largest for those with moderate to strong self-efficacy, and was non-significant for those with poor self-efficacy. Overall, findings suggest that different mechanisms may be operating to maintain binge eating in those with varying levels of eating-related self-efficacy.
Objectives:
Most studies report that marriage carries a lower risk of stroke than single living. Whether the marriage advantage is applicable with respect to all other marital status categories (unmarried, divorced, widow) remains unclear. We studied marital status and its association with incident stroke.
Material and methods:
We included all patients > 40 years of age admitted to hospital for stroke in Denmark during 2003-2012 and compared marital status to the general Danish population (5.5 millions). Relative risks (RR) for stroke were estimated in log-linear Poisson regression models adjusting for age, sex, calendar year, income, and length of education.
Results:
A total of 58 847 patients with incident stroke were included. Crude incidence rates of stroke (per 1000 per year) among the four marital status categories were as follows: 1.96 (married), 1.52 (unmarried), 2.36 (divorced), and 5.43 (widowed). Compared to married persons, adjusted risk of stroke was significantly increased for divorced (RR 1.23; CI 1.19-1.27) and unmarried men (RR 1.07; CI 1.03-1.11) but not for widowed men (RR 1.02; CI 0.98-1.06); risk was slightly increased for divorced women (RR 1.10; CI 1.06-1.15) while not for widowed (RR 1.0; CI 0.97-1.03) and unmarried women (RR 0.97; CI 0.97-1.03).
Conclusions:
Divorce was associated with higher risk of stroke, especially in men. Living in marriage or as unmarried or widower had only little or no impact on the risk of stroke.
Some countries require the provision of menu labels on restaurant menus to fight the increasing prevalence of obesity and related chronic diseases. This study views customers' use of menu labels as a preventive health behavior and applies the Health Belief Model (HBM) with the aim of determining the health belief factors that influence customers' use of menu labels. A self-administered survey was distributed for data collection. Responses were collected from 335 restaurant customers who experienced menu labels in restaurants within three months prior to the survey. The results of a structural equation model showed that all the HBM variables (perceived threats, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers of using menu labels) positively affected the customers' use of menu labels. Perceived threats were influenced by cues to action and cues to action had an indirect influence on menu label use through perceived threats. In conclusion, health beliefs were good predictors of menu label use on restaurant menus. This study validated the application of the HBM to menu labeling in restaurants, and its findings could offer guidelines for the industry and government in developing strategies to expand the use of menu labels among the public.
Objective:
The association between socioeconomic status (SES) and body mass index (BMI) in middle-income countries is mixed. Heterogeneity in SES indicators used could explain some differences. This study aimed to identify SES indicators consistently associated with BMI in Mexican adults in 2006, 2012, and 2016.
Methods:
Data were obtained from the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Surveys of 2006, 2012, and 2016, including adults 20 to 59 years old. Given expected differences by sex, sex-stratified linear regression models were fitted for each survey. Age-adjusted and multivariate models were fit by using seven noncollinear SES indicators.
Results:
In age-adjusted models, most SES indicators were associated with a higher BMI in men; mixed associations were found for women. In multivariate models, living in urban areas was associated with a higher BMI for both men and women in 2006 and 2012. Across all surveys, education was associated with a lower BMI in women, while household assets were associated with a higher BMI in men.
Conclusions:
The association between SES indicators and BMI is complex. Differences by sex need to be explicitly recognized when modeling this association. Approaches that rely on a single indicator could be confounded by other SES indicators. Adjusted models show the specific SES attributes that may influence BMI.
Why do private labels (PLs) enjoy a large market in some countries while hardly penetrating others? What makes a market favorable to PL-product development? Can we identify drivers that explain differences between countries in terms of PL performance? This study aims at addressing these relatively less-researched questions in international marketing literature. We propose an approach that combines market structure, country segmentation and the sensitivity of potential factors in a unique framework. Namely, we use a latent structure formulation to allow for the creation of segments in order to capture the potential heterogeneity among markets and outline their underlying determinants in terms of PL adoption. We provide an empirical illustration using a frequently purchased product category in 71 countries. Our results uncover that the international market for private label is characterized by two distinct patterns.
The statistical tests used in the analysis of structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error are examined. A drawback of the commonly applied chi square test, in addition to the known problems related to sample size and power, is that it may indicate an increasing correspondence between the hypothesized model and the observed data as both the measurement properties and the relationship between constructs decline. Further, and contrary to common assertion, the risk of making a Type II error can be substantial even when the sample size is large. Moreover, the present testing methods are unable to assess a model's explanatory power. To overcome these problems, the authors develop and apply a testing system based on measures of shared variance within the structural model, measurement model, and overall model.
Purpose
This paper aims to first investigate how unit pricing affects consumers’ grocery purchase decisions and perceptions of the shopping task’s information load. The second goal is to test how time pressure enhances the behavioural and perceptual effects of displaying unit prices.
Design/methodology/approach
Two on-line experiments were conducted using national samples of shoppers. In Study 1, participants indicated their choices and perceptions in an inter-brand shopping scenario where prepackaged products have conflicting positions on retail price and unit price. In Study 2, participants conducted the same shopping task but now under a condition of time pressure.
Findings
Study 1 shows that unit pricing shifts consumer choices towards the lower unit priced options and improves their perceptions of task information load. Study 2 shows that when consumers are under time pressure, unit pricing shows stronger effects on choices but not on perceptions.
Research limitations/implications
The study comprised a fairly homogenous set of low involvement categories and relatively small assortments in a hypothetical purchase setting. Exploration of the role of unit pricing in more complex and more realistic purchase environments pose suitable avenues for future research.
Practical implications
This study shows that consumers benefit from unit pricing because it makes it easier for them to find the lower unit priced items and to more quickly complete their shopping task. Retailers will benefit from increased customer satisfaction and possibly an improved store image.
Social implications
The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit pricing and that unit price information does not create harmful effects in terms of increasing their information load.
Originality/value
This study uses a specifically designed and controlled but nevertheless realistic grocery choice task to study the effects of unit pricing in an inter-brand context where there are only small differences in size and price. The study contributes to the literature by showing that in such conditions, unit prices help consumers compare the economic losses associated with product options. Their heuristic role is more pronounced when consumers are under time pressure. The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit prices.
This paper explores the relationship between individual level variables, stimulus variables and the experience of information overload in conjoint experiments. Drawing on theories of contingent information processing, it develops a set of hypotheses linking product class involvement and product class knowledge to the level of information overload experienced by individuals when performing a conjoint task. It also investigates the effects on overload of the total amount of information. The paper also explores to what extent the amount of information to be processed prompts respondents to change their information-processing strategy in order to avoid the unpleasant effects of information overload.
A growing body of literature supports the association between adverse stress experiences and health inequities, including obesity, among African American/Black women. Adverse stress experiences can contribute to poor appetite regulation, increased food intake, emotional eating, binge eating, and sedentary behavior, all of which can contribute to weight gain and obesity. Most research studies concerning the effect of psychological stress on eating behaviors have not examined the unique stress experience, body composition, and eating behaviors of African American/Black women. Even fewer studies have examined these constructs among Black female college students, who have an increased prevalence of overweight and obesity compared to their counterparts. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to examine the associations among emotional eating, perceived stress, contextualized stress, and BMI in African American female college students. All participants identified as African American or Black (N=99). The mean age of the sample was 19.4years (SD=1.80). A statistically significant eating behavior patterns×perceived stress interaction was evident for body mass index (BMI) (β=0.036, S.E.=.0118, p<.01). In addition, a statistically significant eating behavior patterns×contextualized stress interaction was observed for BMI (β=0.007, S.E.=.0027, p=.015). Findings from this study demonstrate that the stress experience interacts with emotional eating to influence BMI. Based on these findings, culturally relevant interventions that target the unique stress experience and eating behavior patterns of young African American women are warranted.
Despite substantial evidence of the linkage between stress and weight change, previous studies have not considered how stress trajectories that begin in childhood and fluctuate throughout adulthood may work together to have long-term consequences for weight change. Working from a stress and life course perspective, we investigate the linkages between childhood stress, adulthood stress and trajectories of change in body mass (i.e., Body Mass Index, BMI) over time, with attention to possible gender variation in these processes. Data are drawn from a national longitudinal survey of the Americans' Changing Lives (N = 3617). Results from growth curve analyses suggest that both women and men who experienced higher levels of childhood stress also report higher levels of stress in adulthood. At the beginning of the study period, higher levels of adulthood stress are related to greater BMI for women but not men. Moreover, women who experienced higher levels of childhood stress gained weight more rapidly throughout the 15-year study period than did women who experienced less childhood stress, but neither childhood nor adulthood stress significantly modified men's BMI trajectories. These findings add to our understanding of how childhood stress-a more important driver of long-term BMI increase than adult stress-reverberates throughout the life course to foster cumulative disadvantage in body mass, and how such processes differ for men and women. Results highlight the importance of considering sex-specific social contexts of early childhood in order to design effective clinical programs that prevent or treat overweight and obesity later in life.
Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Consumers are confronted with conflicting health information in the form of risks and benefits on a regular basis. One way to understand how different consumers handle the challenge of this conflicting information is by considering consumers’ epistemic beliefs, that is, their beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing. In two studies, it is shown that both measured and manipulated epistemic beliefs similarly influence consumer assessments of conflicting risk–benefit health information through two epistemic dimensions—texture (simple or complex) and variability (stable or dynamic). Moderated mediation findings indicate that those who were presented risk–benefit information about health-related products and diets that were perceived as being less (more) familiar had a lower (greater) likelihood of using the product or following the diet through the mediators of thinking about both the risks and the benefits involved, for several of the moderating variability and texture epistemic beliefs. The contribution of this research is to show how epistemic beliefs can differentially frame and inform consumer perceptions and evaluations of conflicted health information.
This study explores influences of human values and trust on stated preferences for food labeled with environmental footprints. We apply survey data to assess the impact of these individual-specific characteristics on German consumers’ choices of potatoes, through an attribute-based choice experiment in which product alternatives are described by footprint labels and prices. We find that accounting for consumers’ value systems, but not generalized trust beliefs, aids in understanding choices and identifying possible markets for footprint-labeled food products.
Major life changes and role transitions are often treated as stressors that create a generalized demand for adjustment by the individual. Empirically, however, these transitions have been shown to produce a wide range of effects on mental health. Two kinds of models have been proposed to explain this variation: differential access to coping resources for dealing with stressful situations, and variation in the characteristics of transitions, such as their undesirability, foreseeability, etc. This paper emphasizes a logically prior issue: the role context within which the transition event occurs, specifically, the level of pre-existing chronic stress in the social role. The model tested envisions life transition events as nonproblematic, or even beneficial to mental health, when preceded by chronic role problems--a case where more "stress" is actually relief from existing stress. Nine transition events are studied: job loss, divorce, pre-marital break-up, retirement, widowhood, children moving out of the house, first marriage, job promotion, and having a child. Results support the hypothesis that prior role stress reduces the impact of life transition events on mental health for seven of nine events, with some differences in impact by gender. The findings provide a basic framework for interpreting the effects of varying types of life transitions, and argue against the presumption that life transitions are inherently stressful, suggesting instead a need to specify prior social circumstances that determine whether or not a transition is potentially stressful.
Using the 1957-1993 data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we explore reciprocal associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and body mass in the 1939 birth cohort of non-Hispanic white men and women. We integrate the fundamental cause theory, the gender relations theory, and the life course perspective to analyze gender differences in (a) the ways that early socioeconomic disadvantage launches bidirectional associations of body mass and SES and (b) the extent to which these mutually reinforcing effects generate socioeconomic disparities in midlife body mass. Using structural equation modeling, we find that socioeconomic disadvantage at age 18 is related to higher body mass index and a greater risk of obesity at age 54, and that this relationship is significantly stronger for women than men. Moreover, women are more adversely affected by two mechanisms underlying the focal association: the obesogenic effect of socioeconomic disadvantage and the SES-impeding effect of obesity. These patterns were also replicated in propensity score-matching models. We conclude that gender and SES act synergistically over the life course to shape reciprocal chains of two disadvantaged statuses: heavier body mass and lower SES.
Prior research suggests that knowledge calibration (KC) supports consumers’ maintenance of a healthy diet. However, no previous studies have considered that learned helpless consumers may refrain from using their knowledge, even though they may be fully aware that they possess it. This research gap is considered in three studies. Study 1 investigates the moderating effect of learned helplessness (LH) by means of a cross‐sectional survey. Studies 2 and 3 are online choice studies. Besides from replicating Study 1, Studies 2 and 3 eliminate potential social desirability bias by objectively measuring respondents’ dietary choice quality. In addition, Study 3 takes into account the possibility that respondents’ responses may be biased by food preferences, medical conditions, and/or food allergies. Moreover, Studies 2 and 3 both investigate the consequences of the findings on consumers who live under a dieting regime. These studies demonstrate that consumers suffering from LH do not stand to gain from calibrating their dietary knowledge to the same degree as other consumers. It is also shown that dieting behavior has a tendency to weaken this negative moderating effect of LH on the relationship between KC and dietary choice quality. Finally, the implications of the findings for marketers and public policymakers are discussed.
Across four experiments, the authors find that when information pertaining to the assessment of the healthiness of food items is provided, the less healthy the item is portrayed to be, (1) the better is its inferred taste, (2) the more it is enjoyed during actual consumption, and (3) the greater is the preference for it in choice tasks when a hedonic goal is more (versus less) salient. The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief. The authors also provide evidence that the association between the concepts of "unhealthy" and "tasty" operates at an implicit level. The authors discuss possibilities for controlling the effect of the unhealthy = tasty intuition (and its potential for causing negative health consequences), including controlling the volume of unhealthy but tasty food eaten, changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes "healthy."
Studies have demonstrated that the ordinal, ipsative data provided by the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS; Rokeach 1973) are not suited to factor analysis. In this study, nonmetric multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used with a sorting task to identify the underlying subset of values. American college students were the participants, and the results indicate that individualism-achievement and collectivism-affiliation are the underlying dimensions of the RVS for both the terminal and the instrumental values. Observed variation in the use of MDS space was predicted, based on participants' developmental differences as measured by the Maslowian Assessment Survey (Williams & Page, 1989). Gender differences in the use of MDS space by participants were not observed. Analysis of angular variance was used to test both hypotheses.
Stress is associated with obesity, and the neurobiology of stress overlaps significantly with that of appetite and energy regulation. This review will discuss stress, allostasis, the neurobiology of stress and its overlap with neural regulation of appetite, and energy homeostasis. Stress is a key risk factor in the development of addiction and in addiction relapse. High levels of stress changes eating patterns and augments consumption of highly palatable (HP) foods, which in turn increases incentive salience of HP foods and allostatic load. The neurobiological mechanisms by which stress affects reward pathways to potentiate motivation and consumption of HP foods as well as addictive drugs is discussed. With enhanced incentive salience of HP foods and overconsumption of these foods, there are adaptations in stress and reward circuits that promote stress-related and HP food-related motivation as well as concomitant metabolic adaptations, including alterations in glucose metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and other hormones related to energy homeostasis. These metabolic changes in turn might also affect dopaminergic activity to influence food motivation and intake of HP foods. An integrative heuristic model is proposed, wherein repeated high levels of stress alter the biology of stress and appetite/energy regulation, with both components directly affecting neural mechanisms contributing to stress-induced and food cue-induced HP food motivation and engagement in overeating of such foods to enhance risk of weight gain and obesity. Future directions in research are identified to increase understanding of the mechanisms by which stress might increase risk of weight gain and obesity.
It is argued that there is now sufficient evidence to regard psychosocial variables, in particular personality and stress, as important risk factors for cancer and coronary heart disease (CHD), equal in importance to smoking, heredity, cholesterol level, blood pressure, and other physical variables. Furthermore, it is now clear that both types of factors act synergistically; that is, each by itself is relatively benign, but their effects multiply to produce high levels of disease. Last but not least, it is argued that there is now good evidence to show that psychological treatment can modify a person's reaction to stress, so that risk of cancer and CHD can be greatly diminished, and duration of survival significantly increased in those terminally ill with cancer. Psychological influences on physical diseases are much greater than suspected in the past; we are only now beginning to trace the causal pathways.
A secondary analysis of data from a study of nutritional vulnerability among 153 women in families seeking charitable food assistance was undertaken to estimate the extent and nutritional significance of at-home food preparation activity for these women. At-home food preparation was estimated from women's reported food intakes from three 24-hour recalls. The relationships between food preparation and energy and nutrient intake, food intake, and 30-day household food security status were characterized. Almost all participants (97%) consumed foods prepared from scratch at least once during the three days of observation; 57% did so each day. Both the frequency and complexity of at-home food preparation were positively related to women's energy and nutrient intakes and their consumption of fruits and vegetables, grain products, and meat and alternates. The intakes by women in households with food insecurity with hunger reflected less complex food preparation but no less preparation from scratch than women in households where hunger was not evident, raising questions about the extent to which food skills can protect very poor families from food insecurity and hunger. Our findings indicate the need for nutrition professionals to become effective advocates for policy reforms to lessen economic constraints on poor households.
The aim of this study was to clarify the direction of the stress-neuroticism relationship in a sample of 200 nursing students from three Spanish universities before their entry into the work force using a two-wave longitudinal design. The Stressful Life Events Scale and NEO-FFI Neuroticism subscale were administered at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of nursing studies. Female students reported higher scores in both perceived stress due to life events and neuroticism than males. Older students scored higher in life events stress than younger ones. High neuroticism was associated with a high level of stress. Finally, neuroticism scores rose in the group in which stress increased from T1 to T2. Our findings partially support the stress causation interactionist model of stress in which life events can modify personality traits. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Res Nurs Health.
Doubts about the viability of material explanations of social inequalities in health have led to a renewed focus on the aetiological role of psychological stress, and, moreover, on how psychological stress is generated by society’s inequality structures. Some researchers maintain that the emerging psychosocial perspective will become the dominant paradigm in research on health inequalities. After commenting on some aetiological topics, the paper outlines how a comprehensive understanding of health inequalities can be constructed from a social stress model, the self-efficacy approach, the sociology emotions, and the social cohesion approach. The emerging perspective is a striking attempt to deal with health inequalities as it seems to solve some of the difficulties that other perspectives have had in accounting for existing empirical patterns. Nevertheless, it is perhaps too much to claim that it signifies a paradigm shift. It should rather be considered as an enrichment of the social causation explanation. The latter, when studying health inequalities, should be developed further by considering both material and psycho-social environments, and their mutual interaction.
The purpose of this review is to spark integrative thinking in the area of eating behaviors by critically examining research on exemplary constructs in this area. The eating behaviors food responsiveness, enjoyment of eating, satiety responsiveness, eating in the absence of hunger, reinforcing value of food, eating disinhibition and impulsivity/self-control are reviewed in relation to energy intake, body mass index and weight gain over time. Each of these constructs has been developed independently, and little research has explored the extent to which they overlap or whether they differentially predict food choices, energy intake and weight gain in the naturalistic environment. Most available data show positive cross-sectional associations with body mass index, but fewer studies report associations with energy intake or food choices. Little prospective data are available to link measures of eating behaviors with weight gain. Disinhibition has the largest and most consistent body of empirical data that link it prospectively with weight gain. An overarching conceptual model to integrate the conceptual and empirical research base for the role of eating behavior dimensions in the field of obesity research would highlight potential patterns of interaction between individual differences in eating behaviors, specific aspects of the individual's food environment and individual variation in state levels of hunger and satiety.