Attention and Self-Control
Most people think that the more attention they can place on their goals and behavior, the better they will be at controlling themselves.  Our work shows that there are certain situations in which people are better at controlling themselves when they are distracted.   First, we have found that there is an optimal amount of distraction that leads to exceptionally good self-control.  We think that amount of distraction keeps people from noticing, and therefore being tempted by, whatever they are trying to resist.  Second, people are also able to control themselves when they are distracted more or less than that optimal amount if they are surrounded by very noticeable reminders of their self-control goals.  Our next step   is to see if we can teach people to use these  distraction techniques as self-control strategies in   their daily life.  This work is funded by the National   Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Relationships and Eating
Many of us have friends that we eat with when we want to have a healthy meal, and other friends that we seek out when we want to go out for ice cream or some other high-calorie treat.  In addition, we may eat differently with our partners than with our friends and family members, or with people of the opposite sex.  We’re starting to look at the way our relationships influence our eating habits by looking at how norms about eating develop.  We’re bringing groups of friends into the lab to see if we can instill a new eating norm in the group, and to see if this new norm carries over to other situations.  We’re also planning to observe the eating patterns of freshman as they acclimate to new friends when they start college. 

How Diets Fail
Our research has shown what many dieters have already noticed: In the long term, people tend to gain back most, if not all, of the weight they lost on their diets.  We are trying to understand how this happens.  To do so, we’ve been looking at the predictors of eating among dieters in their daily lives, and we’ve found that some of the things that we always thought caused dieters to overeat (based on studies conducted in lab settings) don’t actually cause them to overeat.  We’re also interested in the role of chronic stress in dieting.  We think stress might make dieting harder to do, and we suspect that dieting also causes stress.  We’re trying to untangle this so we can find the right advice to give to people who are trying to lose weight.