A paper written by Mathew Gendle, assistant professor of psychology, and Erin Finnegan, a psychology major and 2005 Elon graduate, will be published in the spring 2007 issue of The Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Science.
Titled “Self-imposed Dietary Restraint and Food Stroop Performance in College-Age Women,” the paper details research conducted by Gendle and Finnegan that was first presented at SURF 2005. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that heightened restrictive eating behavior is associated with increases in the time required to correctly complete a selective attention task across both the control and test conditions of the task.
Gendle and Finnegan conclude that increased levels of restrictive eating behavior appear to be related to amplified behavioral self-monitoring, and that (in non-clinical populations) dietary restraint may be an indicator of a broad cognitive strategy to closely regulate behavior across multiple domains.