Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. L. Elizabeth Crawford

Abstract

Many factors have been shown to affect individuals' cognitive performance, such as sleepiness, hunger, motivation, etc. One such factor that has recently gained much attention is self-regulation, or one's ability to control, regulate, or change his or her behaviors. In lay terms, self-regulation may be thought of more or less as self-control. Together, this researchon self-regulation suggests that it is a limited resource, which, when depleted in one area, reduces self-regulationability across other areas. Many past studies regarding self-regulation have incorporated food as a way to deplete self-regulation. In particular, the size of food packaging may be a way to manipulate self-regulation depletion. The current study ties together these past findings on self-regulation and food consumption as it relates to size of packaging. Because people are inclined to eat more food when it is presented in a large package, it should take more self-regulatory resources to resist food in a large package (versus a small package). Therefore,it was hypothesized that participants given a large package of food would show poorer performance on a concurrent cognitive task (the Stroop task) than participants given a small package of food, as measured by the latency and accuracy of responses. Specifically, it was hypothesized that participants given a large package of food would perform more slowly and less accurately on the Stroop task.

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