IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0242461.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rewarding behavior with a sweet food strengthens its valuation

Author

Listed:
  • Jan M Bauer
  • Marina Schröder
  • Martina Vecchi
  • Tina Bake
  • Suzanne L Dickson
  • Michèle Belot

Abstract

Sweet foods are commonly used as rewards for desirable behavior, specifically among children. This study examines whether such practice may contribute to reinforce the valuation of these foods. Two experiments were conducted, one with children, the other with rats. The first study, conducted with first graders (n = 214), shows that children who receive a food reward for performing a cognitive task subsequently value the food more compared to a control group who received the same food without performing any task. The second study, conducted on rats (n = 64), shows that rewarding with food also translates into higher calorie intake over a 24-hour period. These results suggest that the common practice of rewarding children with calorie-dense sweet foods is a plausible contributing factor to obesity and might therefore be ill advised.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan M Bauer & Marina Schröder & Martina Vecchi & Tina Bake & Suzanne L Dickson & Michèle Belot, 2021. "Rewarding behavior with a sweet food strengthens its valuation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(4), pages 1-11, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0242461
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242461
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242461
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242461&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0242461?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adamopoulou, Effrosyni & Olivieri, Elisabetta & Triviza, Eleftheria, 2023. "Eating habits, food consumption, and health: The role of early life experiences," ZEW Discussion Papers 23-054, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0242461. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.