Comparison of Temporal Discounting Among Obese College Students and Obese Adults (original) (raw)
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Robust relation between temporal discounting rates and body mass
Appetite, 2014
When given the choice between 100todayand100 today and 100todayand110 in 1 week, certain people are more likely to choose the immediate, yet smaller reward. The present study examined the relations between temporal discounting rate and body mass while accounting for important demographic variables, depressive symptoms, and behavioral inhibition and approach. After having their heights and weights measured, 100 healthy adults completed the Monetary Choice Questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II, and the Behavioral Inhibition Scale/Behavioral Approach Scale. Overweight and obese participants exhibited higher temporal discounting rates than underweight and healthy weight participants. Temporal discounting rates decreased as the magnitude of the delayed reward increased, even when other variables known to impact temporal discounting rate (i.e., age, education level, and annual household income) were used as covariates. A higher body mass was strongly related to choosing a more immediate monetary reward. Additional research is needed to determine whether consideration-of-future-consequences interventions, or perhaps cognitive control interventions, could be effective in obesity intervention or prevention programs.
Can't wait to lose weight? Characterizing temporal discounting parameters for weight-loss
Appetite, 2015
Obesity is often related to steeper temporal discounting, that is, higher decision impulsivity for immediate rewards over delayed rewards. However, previous studies have measured temporal discounting parameters through monetary rewards. The aim of this study was to develop a temporal discounting measure based on weight-loss rewards, which may help to understand decision-making mechanisms more closely related to body weight regulation. After having their heights and weights measured, healthy young adults completed the Monetary Choice Questionnaire (MCQ), and an adapted version of the MCQ, with weight-loss as a reward. Participants also completed self-reports that measure obesity-related cognitive variables. For fortytwo participants who expressed a desire to lose weight, weight-loss rewards were discounted over time and had a positive correlation with temporal discounting for monetary rewards. Higher temporal discounting for weight loss rewards (i.e., preference for immediate weight loss) showed correlations with beliefs that obesity is under obese persons' control and largely due to lack of willpower, while temporal discounting parameters for monetary rewards did not. Taken together, our weight loss temporal discounting measure demonstrated both convergent and divergent validity, which can be utilized for future obesity research and interventions.
Personality and Individual Differences, 2009
There has been discussion over the extent to which delay discounting -as prototypically shown by a preference for a smaller-sooner sum of money over a larger-later sum -measures the same kind of impulsive preferences that drive non-financial behavior. To address this issue a dataset was analyzed, containing 42,863 participants' responses to a single delaydiscounting choice, along with self-report behaviors that can be considered as impulsive.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Research on delay discounting and inter-temporal choice has yielded significant insights into decision making. Although research has focused on delayed gains, the discounting of losses is potentially important in precisely those areas where the discounting of gains has proved informative (e.g., substance use and abuse). Participants in the current study completed both a questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed gains and an analogous questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed losses. For almost all participants, the likelihood of choosing the delayed gain decreased with increases in the wait until it would be received. In contrast, when losses (i.e., payments) were involved, different participants showed quite different patterns of choices. More specifically, although the majority of the participants became increasingly likely to choose to pay later as the delay was increased, some participants appeared to be debt averse, in that they were more likely to choose the immediate payment option when the delay was long than when it was brief. These debt-averse participants also were more likely to choose to wait for a larger delayed gain than other participants and scored lower on Impulsiveness than those who showed the typical pattern of discounting delayed losses. Taken together, these results suggest that in the case of delayed gains, people differ only quantitatively (i.e., in how steeply they discount), whereas in the case of delayed losses, people differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively, contrary to the common assumption that a single impulsivity trait underlies choices between immediate and delayed outcomes.
Delay discounting as impaired valuation: Delayed rewards in an animal obesity model
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2017
Obesity is a major public health problem, which, like many forms of addiction, is associated with an elevated tendency to choose smaller immediate rather than larger delayed rewards, a response pattern often referred to as excessive delay discounting. Although some accounts of delay discounting conceptualize this process as impulsivity (placing the emphasis on overvaluing the smaller immediate reward), others have conceptualized delay discounting as an executive function (placing the emphasis on delayed rewards failing to retain their value). The present experiments used a popular animal model of obesity that has been shown to discount delayed rewards at elevated rates (i.e., obese Zucker rats) to test two predictions that conceptualize delay discounting as executive function. In the first experiment, acquisition of lever pressing with delayed rewards was compared in obese versus lean Zucker rats. Contrary to predictions based on delay discounting as executive function, obese Zucker rats learned to press the lever more quickly than controls. In the second experiment, progressive ratio breakpoints (a measure of reward efficacy) with delayed rewards were compared in obese versus lean Zucker rats. Contrary to the notion that obese rats fail to value delayed rewards, the obese Zucker rats' breakpoints were (at least) as high as those of the lean Zucker rats.
Fat Debtors: Time Discounting, Its Anomalies, and Body Mass Index
2009
In view of the finding that debtors are likely to be more obese than nondebtors, we investigate whether interpersonal differences in body mass are, as in the case of debt behavior, related to those in time discounting and time discounting anomalies. The effects of time discounting on body mass index (BMI) and the probabilities of being obese, severely obese, and underweight are detected by incorporating three properties of intertemporal preferences: (i) impatience, measured by the level of the respondents' discount rate; (ii) hyperbolic discounting, where discount rates for the discounting of immediate future payoffs are higher than those of distant future payoffs; and (iii) the sign effect, wherein future negative payoffs are discounted at a lower rate than are future positive payoffs. We also find that body mass is non-monotonically correlated with age, income, and working hours. As a policy implication, body mass can potentially be controlled by changing the intertemporal structure of medical care costs.
Delay discounting, cognitive ability, and personality: What matters?
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2020
Steep delay discounting is associated with problems such as addiction, obesity, and risky sexual behavior that are frequently described as reflecting impulsiveness and lack of self-control, but it may simply indicate poor cognitive functioning. The present investigation took advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Human Connectome Project (N=1,206) to examine the relation between delay discounting and 11 cognitive tasks as well as the Big Five fundamental personality traits. With income level and education statistically controlled, discounting was correlated with only four of the 11 cognitive abilities evaluated, although the rs were all small (<.20). Importantly, the two discounting measures loaded on their own factor. Discounting was not correlated with Neuroticism or Conscientiousness, traits related to psychometric impulsiveness and self-control. These findings suggest that steep delay discounting is not simply an indicator of poor cognitive functioning or psychometric impulsiveness but an important individual difference characteristic in its own right.
Appetite, 2014
Previous research comparing obese and non-obese samples on the delayed discounting procedure has produced mixed results. The aim of the current study was to clarify these discrepant findings by comparing a variety of temporal discounting measures in a large sample of internet users (n = 1163) obtained from a crowdsourcing service, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Measures of temporal, social-temporal (a combination of standard and social temporal), and probability discounting were obtained. Significant differences were obtained on all discounting measures except probability discounting, but the obtained effect sizes were small. These data suggest that larger-N studies will be more likely to detect differences between obese and non-obese samples, and may afford the opportunity, in future studies, to decompose a large obese sample into different subgroups to examine the effect of other relevant measures, such as the reinforcing value of food, on discounting.
Personality and Individual Differences, 2010
Delay discounting, a willingness to postpone receiving an immediate reward in order to gain additional benefits in the future, is conceptually related to time perspective, the cognitive processes which filter temporal information and influence behavior. One measure of delay discounting (Money Choice Questionnaire) and two measures of time perspective (Consideration of Future Consequences Scale and Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory) were compared in this study to each other and to self-reported health behaviors with 467 undergraduates. Delay discounting and time perspective significantly improved the incremental prediction of tobacco, alcohol, and drug use, exercise frequency, eating breakfast, wearing a safety belt, estimated longevity, health concerns, and sociosexual orientation above and beyond sex and Big Five traits. These results further suggest that delay discounting and time perspective are indeed similar but also non-redundant constructs that are not reducible to global personality.
Associations Between Delay Discounting and Risk-Related Behaviors, Traits, Attitudes, and Outcomes
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2016
Delay discounting-preference for immediate, smaller rewards over distal, larger rewards-has been argued to be part of the "generality of deviance", which describes the co-occurrence of various forms of impulsive and risky behaviors among individuals. Some studies have linked laboratory-measured delay discounting to behaviors, traits, attitudes, and outcomes associated with risk, but these associations have been inconsistent. Furthermore, many of these studies have been conducted with exclusively undergraduate samples, or in samples offering low statistical power. In a large community sample (n = 328) diverse in age and socioeconomic status, we examined associations between two measures of behavioral delay discounting (single-shot and canonical k-parameter estimation) and behavioral risk-taking, personality traits associated with risk, domain-specific risk attitudes, gambling and problem gambling, antisocial behavior, and criminal outcomes. In addition, we explored whether a novel response time latency measure of delay discounting explained variance in these risk-related outcomes. Results indicated that behavioral delay discounting was consistently associated with all variables related to impulse control: high trait impulsivity, low trait self-control, risk-averse attitudes toward financial investment, risk-prone attitudes toward gambling and health/safety risks, gambling and problem gambling, antisocial conduct, and criminal outcomes. Latency-measured delay discounting was inconsistently associated with behavioral delay discounting and risk-related measures. Together, results suggest that delay discounting is associated with poor impulse control consistent with a generality of deviance account.