The role of cognitive processing on dieter's success or fail

Obesity is one of the most important problems which threaten global health. Healthcare organizations spend a large amount of money to predict and treat obesity every year. The most common treatment for obesity is concentrated on shaping a new lifestyle with more exercise and healthy diet. But a multitude of dieters fail. In this study, the role of cognitive processing in dieters` success or fail was investigated. Participants were successful (N= 42) and unsuccessful (N= 45) dieters between 18 and 40 years old. Attentional bias, positive implicit association, and working memory capacity were respectively measured by Dot-probe, a modified version of implicit association test (IAT), and N-Back. Results indicated that unsuccessful dieters showed greater attentional bias to (d= 0.69) and more food preferences for (d= 1.06) high-calorie food pictures. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference in implicit associations and working memory capacity between groups. These results were congruent with some previous studies and they were discussed based on dual-processing model.