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C14/17/047#54271070

Abstract:

Stress is associated with various suboptimal behaviors, such as poor dietary choices and smoking. Recent studies suggest that stress can impair the ability to engage in goal-directed behavior so that people have to rely on habitual behavior. Based on these findings, suboptimal behavior under stress is often seen as habitual. Support for this idea comes from a study by Schwabe and Wolf (2009), in which stressed participants continued to perform a learned instrumental behavior leading to food, even after the food was devalued with a satiation procedure. As an alternative explanation for these findings, it could be argued that if behavior is insensitive to the devaluation of one goal (e.g., goal to consume a certain food), which indicates that it is not driven by this goal, it could still be driven by another goal (e.g., stress regulation). Although stressed participants ate the food to satiety, it is still palatable and may thus be seen as a way to regulate stress. We tested whether the results of the study by Schwabe and Wolf (2009) would replicate with a stronger devaluation procedure (i.e., taste aversion), which makes the food unpalatable, so that the strategy to reduce stress by eating palatable food becomes unavailable. We predicted that a stronger devaluation leads to a change in behavior in stressed participants. In other words, if the outcome becomes aversive, stressed participants will not continue to perform the instrumental action leading to the food, indicating goal-directed behavior under stress.