Memory for weight-, food-, and appearance-related information was examined in female restrained and unrestrained college students and in female obese and eating-disordered patients. Subjects read an essay about another person and were later asked to recall the essay as completely as possible. As predicted, restrained students remembered more weight-and food-related items than appearance-related items in comparison to the unrestrained students. Similarly, the obese and anorexic patients recalled significantly more of the weight-and food-related items than the other items. In both samples, restraint scores were positively correlated with the frequency with which subjects mentioned weight and food in an "accessibility" task. The discussion focused on the implications of these findings.
Research by Herman and Polivy and their colleagues (Herman & Polivy, 1988a; Polivy & Herman, 1985) has shown that restrained and unrestrained eaters (roughly dieters and nondieters) differ in their eating behavior. However, there has been relatively little research on the cognitive aspects of restraint. Cognitive aspects of restrained eating are of interest for several reasons. First, the Restraint Scale (Herman & Polivy, 1980) is largely a measure of the individual's subjective concern with weight and attitudes about dieting. Also, the mediators of the anomalous eating displayed by dieters are presumed to be predominantly cognitive (Polivy & Herman, 1985, 1987: for a discussion of the role of cognitions in dieters' eating). Perhaps most importantly, restrained eating resembles the pathologies of anorexia and bulimia nervosa in many ways, both behaviorally and cognitively in the shared concern with weight loss, body Cillian A. King, Ph.D., is Research Coordinator at the Tharnes Valley Children's Centre.