"Eat What You Want and Be Healthy!": Comfort Food Effects: Human-Food Interaction in View of Celebratory Technology

Food craving is one of the fundamental desires of human nature. Many HCI researchers used to define this desire as a problem and has developed its corrective technology. However, positive aspects of food craving and food reward has rarely been in the scope of research. Few studies made its efforts to evaluate how food positively interacts with mental aspects of humans but have shown inconsistent results because of user subjectivity and environmental variations. Therefore, we have evaluated the human-food interactions with an EEG as objective indicator to track the mental activity. We found that when participants have a high craving for the certain food, which makes them feel comfort (hereafter comfort food), their working memory performance and related theta signal increase and stress related high beta signal decrease. The methodology adopted in this study will contribute to the progress in food-related celebratory technologies in HCI research field.

[1]  Josée Poirier,et al.  Effectiveness of a multimodal online well-being intervention: a randomized controlled trial. , 2014, American journal of preventive medicine.

[2]  Bärbel Knäuper,et al.  Replacing craving imagery with alternative pleasant imagery reduces craving intensity , 2011, Appetite.

[3]  Li-Wei Ko,et al.  An EEG-based approach for evaluating audio notifications under ambient sounds , 2014, CHI.

[4]  Kenton O'Hara,et al.  Food and interaction design: designing for food in everyday life , 2012, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[5]  Marika Tiggemann,et al.  The nature of imagery processes underlying food cravings. , 2005, British journal of health psychology.

[6]  Jp van Niekerk.  Less food for thought. , 2003, Harvard health letter.

[7]  James Fogarty,et al.  Examining Unlock Journaling with Diaries and Reminders for In Situ Self-Report in Health and Wellness , 2016, CHI.

[8]  Stephen H. Fairclough,et al.  The Effect of an Extrinsic Incentive on Psychophysiological Measures of Mental Effort and Motivational Disposition when Task Demand is Varied , 2010 .

[9]  P. Uhlhaas,et al.  Working memory and neural oscillations: alpha–gamma versus theta–gamma codes for distinct WM information? , 2014, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[10]  A. Haycox,et al.  Having Your Cake and Eating It , 2012, PharmacoEconomics (Auckland).

[11]  M. Cyr,et al.  Characteristics of industrial and laboratory meat and bone meal ashes and their potential applications. , 2008, Journal of hazardous materials.

[12]  J. F. Alonso,et al.  Stress assessment based on EEG univariate features and functional connectivity measures , 2015, Physiological measurement.

[13]  Desney S. Tan,et al.  Feasibility and pragmatics of classifying working memory load with an electroencephalograph , 2008, CHI.

[14]  Florian Pinel,et al.  What's Cooking with Chef Watson? An Interview with Lav Varshney and James Briscione , 2015, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[15]  James A. Jones,et al.  Stress influences appetite and comfort food preferences in college women , 2006 .

[16]  M. Gibney,et al.  Dietary advice to reduce fat intake is more successful when it does not restrict habitual eating patterns. , 1999, Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

[17]  A. Baddeley.  Working memory: looking back and looking forward , 2003, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[18]  K. Laugero,et al.  Having your cake and eating it too: A habit of comfort food may link chronic social stress exposure and acute stress-induced cortisol hyporesponsiveness , 2013, Physiology & Behavior.

[19]  Jon May,et al.  Elaborated Intrusion Theory: A Cognitive-Emotional Theory of Food Craving , 2012, Current Obesity Reports.

[20]  Jon May,et al.  Use of a clay modeling task to reduce chocolate craving , 2012, Appetite.

[21]  K. Ewing,et al.  T he impact of wor king memory load on psychophysiological measures of mental effort and motivational disposition , 2010 .

[22]  Rajesh Chandwani,et al.  Rice Today, Roti Tomorrow: Diets and Diabetes in Urban Indian Households , 2017, CHI.

[23]  Jon May,et al.  Less food for thought. Impact of attentional instructions on intrusive thoughts about snack foods , 2010, Appetite.

[24]  Jinjin Pan,et al.  New Application, Development and Aerospace Prospect of fNIR , 2013 .

[25]  Roberta Larson Duyff,et al.  American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide , 2002 .

[26]  Jon May,et al.  Brief guided imagery and body scanning interventions reduce food cravings , 2013, Appetite.

[27]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Development of working memory: should the Pascual-Leone and the Baddeley and Hitch models be merged? , 2000, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[28]  Steven Pemberton,et al.  CHI '97 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 1997, CHI 1997.

[29]  Julien Penders,et al.  Wearable, Wireless EEG Solutions in Daily Life Applications: What are we Missing? , 2015, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

[30]  Sean A. Munson,et al.  Crumbs: Lightweight Daily Food Challenges to Promote Engagement and Mindfulness , 2016, CHI.

[31]  A. Schaefer,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article Cognition & Emotion Assessing the Effectiveness of a Large Database of Emotion-eliciting Films: a New Tool for Emotion Researchers , 2022 .

[32]  Richard Harper,et al.  Celebratory technology: new directions for food research in HCI , 2008, CHI.

[33]  M. Tiggemann,et al.  Modality-specific imagery reduces cravings for food: an application of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire to food craving. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[34]  Jon May,et al.  Images of desire: Cognitive models of craving , 2004, Memory.

[35]  Tanzeem Choudhury,et al.  Passive and In-Situ assessment of mental and physical well-being using mobile sensors , 2011, UbiComp '11.

[36]  Suzanne D Johanningsmeier,et al.  Metabolomic Technologies for Improving the Quality of Food: Practice and Promise. , 2016, Annual review of food science and technology.

[37]  Tanzeem Choudhury,et al.  Tracking Mental Well-Being: Balancing Rich Sensing and Patient Needs , 2014, Computer.

[38]  A. Tomiyama,et al.  Comfort food is comforting to those most stressed: Evidence of the chronic stress response network in high stress women , 2011, Psychoneuroendocrinology.

[39]  Daniel Brandeis,et al.  Frontal Midline Theta Reflects Individual Task Performance in a Working Memory Task , 2014, Brain Topography.

[40]  Matthew Chalmers,et al.  Persuasion not required Improving our understanding of the sociotechnical context of dietary behavioural change , 2009, 2009 3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare.

[41]  Ann Blandford,et al.  Persuasive technology for overcoming food cravings and improving snack choices , 2014, CHI.