What and How You See Affects Your Appetite

We have previously shown that priming by a given color facilitates participant's appetite to that color (Liao, et al., 2010). The current study aims to further examine whether the way participant's experiencing the color affects the effect of color on appetite. In two experiments, participants were primed with a particular color by conducting an active cognitive task, or with a color paper upon which the questionnaire was printed. Participants were asked to complete the questionnaire regarding the sensations of taste/smell/flavor and their consumptive attitude toward sample candies with different colors. We measured their actual initial choice of the colored candy when they answered the questionnaire and the total amount of candy consumption during the experiment. Results showed that active color priming by the pre-executed cognitive task was correlated with initial choice but not explicit attitude. By contrast, no such direct influence of color on appetite was found when the color was primed passively with the printed paper. We conclude that color priming can affect appetite even without conscious evaluation of the relationship between them and this is more so with active priming than passive priming