HC Work hard, play hard. Neuropsychological correlates and behavioral implications of hedonic compensation.

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Lotte van Dillen; Professor Dr. Wilhelm Hofmann; Henk van Steenbergen, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396787447

People pay less and less attention to their meals and often eat while watching TV, while driving, or while monitoring their computers. At the same time, foods and drinks have become sweeter, saltier, and fatter over the past decades. We argue that these are not independent trends. Engaging in activities requires mental capacity. This capacity is limited, leaving less room for processing of sensory information such as taste. We posit that mental load, induced by concurrent tasks or concerns, interferes with reward processing from consumption. Because people strive to obtain pleasure from the goods they consume, they employ compensatory behaviors to up-regulate hedonic value. We advance a new framework to understand this phenomenon, which we label hedonic compensation. We will integrate lab-based behavioral neuroscience experiments with experience sampling studies in the field. By linking neural reward responses to sweet substances with consumption, we examine how reduced hedonic processing under mental load leads to compensation. By extending our findings to other consumption domains, and to the real world, we study the general nature of hedonic compensation. In our project, we combine the expertise of two research labs to gain more insight in the relationship between mental capacity, hedonic experience, and consumption, and in the problems resulting from an imbalance between these factors. This, in turn, may lead to new tools to help people live a fulfilling and healthy life.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands