The Role of Emotional Arousal in Food Preference and Taste

One hundred and fifty men and women will participate in three laboratory sessions to assess stress responses to personal stress imagery, food cue imagery, and to neutral-relaxing imagery. Subjects will be distributed into 3 groups stratified by BMI category. Subject recruitment, eligibility determination, baseline assessments and script development will be conducted at the Yale Stress Center. Subjects will complete a variety of diagnostic, cognitive and psychological assessments, a comprehensive physical examination and blood work and will be involved in development of imagery scripts from personal stress, food cue and neutral-relaxing situations. Subjects will then be scheduled for three laboratory sessions at the Yale Stress Center. Subjects will also participate in an imagery and relaxation training session followed by three laboratory sessions. The three laboratory sessions will be conducted within a brief interval of days, when subjects will be exposed to a personal stress, a food cue and a neutral-relaxing imagery condition, one condition per day. The order of imagery conditions will be randomly assigned and counterbalanced across subjects in order to balance any influences due to order of imagery conditions.