The Role of Goal-Directed and Habitual Processes in Food Consumption Under Stress After Outcome Devaluation With Taste Aversion

People are more likely to engage in various suboptimal behaviors such as overeating, addictive behaviors, and short-sighted financial decision-making when they are under stress. Traditional dual-process models propose that stress can impair the ability to engage in goal-directed behavior so that people have to rely on habitual behavior. Support for this idea comes from a study by Schwabe and Wolf (2010), in which stressed participants continued to perform a learned instrumental behavior leading to a liquid after the liquid was devalued with a satiation procedure. Based on these findings, suboptimal behavior under stress is often seen as habitual. In the present study, we conducted a conceptual replication of the study by Schwabe and Wolf (2010). Instead of using a satiation procedure to achieve the outcome devaluation, we devalued outcomes through taste aversion. We did not replicate the pattern of findings by Schwabe and Wolf (2010). Our results indicate instead that stressed participants were sensitive to outcome values when the outcomes became truly aversive and hence that their behavior was goal-directed. This suggests either that (a) habitual processes are subject to boundary conditions or (b) the processes responsible for the findings of Schwabe and Wolf (2010) were never habitual to begin with. This may have far-reaching implications for explaining suboptimal behavior under stress in general.

Automated summary

People are more likely to engage in suboptimal behaviors under stress, such as overeating and short-sighted financial decision-making. Traditional dual-process models suggest that stress impairs goal-directed behavior, leading to reliance on habitual behavior. However, a conceptual replication study found that stressed participants were sensitive to outcome values when the outcomes became aversive, suggesting that suboptimal behavior under stress may not always be habitual.