A study found out that women maybe more responsive to romance when they are full.
The study, which is published in the Appetite journal, focused on how women's brains respond to images of fatty foods on an empty and full stomach. Author, Alice Ely, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, found out that both their hunger status and dieting history influenced brain activation patterns.
Moreover, they discovered that a woman's hunger state had an effect on another highly rewarding stimuli beyond food: romance, Time shared.
Together with her co-researchers, they recruited 20 young women who were all in normal weight, Science Direct shared. Half had never tried dieting, while half had tried to lose weight at least twice in the past.
All of them fasted for eight hours, then came to the laboratory hungry. The researchers then sent them into fMRI scanner, where the women viewed romantic photographs such as couple holding hands and other neutral snaps like a bowling ball.
The researchers have seen alike levels of activation between the two groups of women. They then drank 500 calories' worth of a meal replacement drink and popped back into the scanner to look at the same photos again in full stomach.
"They were more responsive to romantic cues," Alice said. "Instead of being anxious and annoyed and irritable when you're hungry...once we're sated, then we can get on to better things," she concluded as to why that might be the case.
Psychology Professor Traci Mann from University of Minnesota, who is also a dieting researcher who was not involved with the research, said that the results make sense. When you're fasting, you're "entirely preoccupied and focused with thoughts of food," she said. "It seems to me it would be hard for them to be drawn away from thinking about food to thinking about other things."
Other studies has shown that post-meal brain activity in response to romantic cues was especially strong in the young women who has reported dieting in the past. Too, it was made known that when dieters usually show a stronger brain response after they have eaten when they are offered rewards like food. -- which suggests that they're still kind of motivated to eat even once they're nutritionally full," Alice said.
"But what we're seeing is that's kind of true for stuff beyond just food," she added. "There's some evidence that people who are more impulsive or more reward-sensitive tend to eat more in certain situations, but there haven't been too many imaging studies looking at this population and looking across different kinds of stimuli."
Alice, however, cautioned that it is only a pilot study with a small group of women of the same age and recommended that much more research is needed to draw any conclusions. "It's all very speculative, but it's still very interesting and a sort of unexpected finding," she said.
