High-calorie food cues extended perceptual time in adolescent girls, revealing how media pressure and body image shape even basic cognitive processing.
Paper: Beyond calories: The role of media pressure and body appreciation in shaping time perception of food cues in female adolescents. Image credit: Andrii Yalanskyi / Shutterstock
In the Journal’s recent “Press Articles” scientific reportresearchers evaluated the interaction between food cues, psychological factors, and time perception in adolescent females.
Adolescence is characterized by increased sensitivity to sociocultural factors such as body image and media pressure. In this context, everyday stimuli such as food can acquire substantial emotional value and give rise to desire and anxiety.
Food-related cues can act as strong emotional triggers for adolescents, especially for women. Nevertheless, how such stimuli affect fundamental cognitive processes such as time perception remains poorly understood.
Media pressure can promote the internalization of diluted ideals, potentially leading to increased diet-related anxiety and chronic body dissatisfaction. Conversely, body appreciation, defined as respecting, protecting, and accepting one’s body, whether or not it conforms to beauty ideals, can be protective. It may foster a compassionate relationship with oneself and act as an emotional and cognitive buffer against external pressures.
About research
In this study, researchers investigated how exposure to food cues influences time perception in adolescent females and how individual differences in perceived media pressure and body awareness shape this effect. They recruited female adolescents from a private high school in southeastern France for a quasi-experimental pilot study. A computer-based temporal bisection task involving food images was conducted.
First, participants had to discriminate between standard short durations (400 ms) and long durations (1600 ms) based on non-food control images. Next, in addition to the standard short and long periods, five intermediate periods (600–1400 ms) were included in the test phase, and trials were presented randomly without feedback. Temporal stimuli included images of low- and high-calorie foods. After the temporal bisection task, three validated questionnaires were administered.
Media-related sociocultural pressures were assessed using the Sociocultural Attitudes towards Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ). Body appreciation was assessed using the Body Appreciation Scale (BAS). The Sick, Control, One, Fat, and Food (SCOFF) questionnaire was used to examine eating disorder risk. Participants provided demographic information including age, height, and weight. Linear associations between variables were assessed using Pearson correlation.
The bisection point (BP) of the time dichotomous task was estimated to be “long” 50% of the time reported by the participant. The Weber ratio (WR) was estimated as the ratio of differential lime to BP. The differential limen was calculated as the difference in duration corresponding to 75% and 25% longer responses. Additionally, analysis of covariance was used to assess the influence of image type on WR and BP while controlling for SATAQ or BAS scores.
Survey results
The study involved 55 women with an average age of 16.5 years and a BMI of 22.1 kg/m2. A high proportion of participants (69%) screened positive for eating disorder risk on the SCOFF questionnaire, but this was not a clinical diagnosis. There was a significant main effect of image type, with images of high-calorie foods leading to overestimation of time. No significant effect on the Weber ratio was observed, indicating that the main difference is related to perceived duration rather than temporal sensitivity. A significant interaction between SATAQ score and image type was observed, indicating that the effect of image type was contingent on the level of sociocultural influence.
To better understand this interaction effect, linear regression analysis was performed. This revealed that increased SATAQ scores were associated with greater differences between image types on BP. That is, the greater the media pressure, the more likely participants are to overestimate the duration of high-calorie images compared to low-calorie images. This moderating effect persisted even after accounting for SCOFF-defined eating disorder risk. There was no significant effect of image type on blood pressure when controlling for BAS score.
However, there was a trend for an interaction between image type and BAS score, which did not reach statistical significance. In post hoc analyzes controlling for eating disorder risk (SCOFF score), there was a significant interaction between image type and BAS score. This suggests that blood pressure differences decrease as body appreciation increases, given the risk of eating disorders.
conclusion
In summary, high-calorie food cues led to overestimation of duration compared to low-calorie food cues in adolescent females. This temporal distortion was amplified by perceived media pressure but may have been attenuated by increased body awareness. However, the findings for body awareness were strongest only in the post hoc model.
Overall, the results provide evidence that psychosocial context shapes temporal perception of eating cues in adolescent females. However, because media pressure and body evaluations were measured rather than experimentally manipulated, these moderation findings should be interpreted as relevant.
Further research is needed to identify causal relationships and test whether the results generalize beyond female students in French private high schools.
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Reference magazines:
- Jares Q, Reyes Pavon D, Fraudías V (2026). Beyond calories: The role of media pressure and body appreciation in shaping time perception of food cues in adolescent women. scientific report. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57924-1
