Psychology and food studies spans virtually every “sub-discipline” of the field. Methodologies vary and the utility of the scholarship spans from cultural and ethnic facets of food experiences to the neuronal level of how our brains respond to specific tastes, smells, and ingredients. Most of the scholarship has focused on a few circumscribed areas, namely eating disorders, obesity, and intake regulation, in addition to a smaller handful of scholarship which has championed the cultural and ethnic facets of the psychology of food. In recent years new work has emerged in clinical, cultural, cognitive, experimental, neuro, and evolutionary psychology.
Historically speaking, the discipline of psychology has paid surprisingly little attention to food and eating. Most of the scholarship has focused on a few circumscribed areas, namely eating disorders, obesity, and intake regulation, in addition to a smaller handful of scholarship that has championed the cultural and ethnic facets of the psychology of food. This body of work has begun to change more rapidly in recent years, with new work emerging in clinical, cultural, cognitive, experimental, neuro, and evolutionary psychology. Taken together, the discipline is arriving at a broader, though still nascent approach to food studies, with enormous possibility on the horizon.
Anna Freud began the study of food in its logical place: breastfeeding. In her essay “The Psychoanalytic Study of Infantile Feeding Disturbances” (1946), she was the first to argue that unhealthy eating behaviors in adulthood were rooted in early maladaptive family relationships. Anna Freud believed that ambivalence toward the mother may manifest itself as vacillating bingeing and purging behaviors, or that guilty feelings toward the mother would manifest themselves as an inability to enjoy food, or that jealousy of the mother’s love for other children would manifest itself as greediness or insatiability. For decades after Anna Freud’s work, most of the scholarship on the psychology of food continued in the psychoanalytic tradition, often using Sigmund Freud’s oral stage of psychosexual development as the basis for understanding food-related pathologies. These ideas can’t be put to experimental test, but as with much Freudian and psychoanalytic theory, the theory now seems dated to most and rests outside mainstream, contemporary psychology.
In contrast to the psychoanalytic tradition, experimental psychologists have been studying eating in humans and non-human animals for a shorter period, but with more scientific rigor. This research tends to be less about food per se, than about bodily functions and regulation. Largely regulated by the hypothalamus, hunger and thirst have been the subject of many decades of experimental research. Both brain anatomy and chemistry, specifically neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin regulate meal size, thirst, and frequency. The best primer on experimental psychology and food is A.W. Logue’s ambitious volume, The Psychology of Eating and Drinking (2004), which reviews the literature on thirst, hunger, satiety, taste preferences, disordered eating, and obesity. Written primarily to serve as a classroom textbook and with over a thousand references, it is an impressive review and synthesis of the extant scholarship on eating and drinking from experimental psychology. In addition to intake regulation and taste preference development, the book is also devoted to eating- and drinking-related pathologies, namely bulimia, anorexia, obesity, alcoholism, smoking, diabetes, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Logue reviews the etiology, course, and treatment of these disorders, as well as provides resources and referral information for those seeking treatment. Interestingly, there is a great deal of variation in how different people experience the taste of the same foods. What tastes bitter to some is undetectable to others. For example, researchers have determined that people can generally be classified into one of three groups: supertasters, tasters, and nontasters, based upon their gustatory sensitivity to phenylthiocarbamide, or the chemical that causes bitter tastes. Not only do each of us have different thresholds of phenylthiocarbamide sensitivity, but there are significant cross-cultural differences that may also serve to partially explain how certain components of cuisine have developed around the world. For example, about one-third of North Americans are non-tasters, meaning that beer, coffee, saccharin, and certain dark green vegetables are palatable, whereas about 10 percent of Chinese university students are non-tasters, meaning that the aforementioned food and drinks taste overwhelmingly bitter to them (Logue, 2004: 56).
Another excellent introductory volume to psychology and food studies is Elizabeth Capaldi’s Why We Eat What We Eat: The Psychology of Eating (1996). This edited volume moves away from the strictly bodily cues of hunger and satiety, and instead examines eating patterns based on life experiences. The focus, then, is on how humans learn about eating, from conditioning experiences as well as from family and culture, rather than the purely physiological mechanisms involved in hunger, digestion, and eating. Partly written with practitioners in mind, this book advances the idea that healthful eating patterns can be learned. Comparisons of eating patterns are made between obese and non-obese individuals, as well as explorations of early factors in taste and flavor preferences, including the development of food preferences that begin prenatally. One contributor to this volume is Paul Rozin, often considered the most established “food psychologist.” Outside of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology, other voices were mostly absent until Rozin, who had largely focused on laboratory work, began looking at cultural determinants of food, as well as influences of the ancestral diet (Rozin, 1996, 2007).
Additionally, Rozin has conducted research contrasting the French and American diets in order to better understand the “French Paradox” (Rozin et al., 2003). He argues that many factors account for the differences in diet and cultural relationships to food. First, the French focus more on the experience of food, rather than the consequences. They are also less concerned about variety, which is notable because psychologists have shown that increased variety is related to overweight and obesity. In one study, for example, French respondents stated that they preferred to have ten flavor choices for ice cream, rather than the 50 choices preferred by Americans. Food variety was crucial for our ancestors in order to avoid nutritional deficiencies, but in our contemporary world of overabundance (in many places in the world) variety does a disservice to the individual because it increases overall calorie consumption. Other factors identified by Rozin in explaining the French paradox are lifestyle: Homes and neighborhoods designed where walking and bicycling are easier than driving, small markets, bakeries, and butchers are easily accessible to many. Snacking between meals is not common, and a general attitude of moderation prevails over a drive toward abundance seen in the United States.
In Desire, Ritual, and Cuisine (Cargill, 2007) I write about the psychological experience of many food rituals, particularly those related to specific rites of passages that have been handed down over generations. I argue that many food rituals attempt to invoke the past, a group’s history, or even the deceased. In the Mexican celebration Día de los Muertos, for example, altars are made for the dead and women spend all day preparing the favorite food of the deceased to place at the altar. Other food rituals invoke a temporal regression as a means of connecting with one’s ancestors. In the highly ritualized Passover Seder, for example, the Seder plate contains important symbols of the holiday. Maror, the bitter herbs, are used as a symbol of the bitterness of slavery. Zeroa, a roasted shank bone, is a symbol of the Passover sacrifice. Salt water is also used to symbolize the tears of slavery. The Seder is a ritual meant to bridge the cultural space and emotional experience between generations, faraway places, and the rituals of one’s ancestors. It is not only the telling of a story, but a reenactment. It is an important component of both religious identity and history in that it also tells the story of a people so that it is never forgotten. The Seder then is a mechanism by which psychological “genes” are handed down through generations and transmit political information through oral history (Volkan, 1997). The poignant role of food and food ritual in the intergenerational transmission of sociopolitical history can be seen in the humorous Jewish saying regarding religious holidays: “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”
In other recent research evolutionary psychologists have contributed to the knowledge base on food. Deirdre Barrett’s book entitled Waistland (2007) examines how foraging behavior, adaptive in ancestral times, becomes maladaptive in our sedentary, prosperous society. Barrett’s audience is those who want to lose weight and/or stop the cycle of dieting. In addition to explaining the evolutionary determinants for food preferences, she also covers the physiological responses to certain foods, particularly glucose. Using the concept of “supernormal stimuli” from ethology, she explains how artificial objects can appeal to our senses more than the natural stimuli for which those instincts were designed, leading us to crave high sugar, high fat, and high salt foods. Other researchers refer to these as “superfoods”, referring to “hyperpalatable” foods that surpass the rewarding properties of traditional foods (Gearhardt et al., 2011).
Although not a psychologist, primatologist Richard Wrangham (2009) argues that cooking food, which began probably about 500,000 years ago, is what originally separated humans from apes and from our non-human ancestors. Evolutionary psychologists would do well to build on Wrangham’s work, particularly to understand behavior related to cooking and food acquisition. He argues that our ancestors discovered that the control of fire could be used to cook food, which offered crucial biological advantages, such as maximizing energy, impeding food spoilage, and improving overall food safety. Quite simply, the energy the body must expend to consume and digest raw food is significantly more than what it expends when the same food is cooked. The energy of the heat used for cooking effectively pre-digests food, allowing the body to preserve more of its energy, allowing for a net gain in calories – a crucial biological advantage when food was scarce. In other words, Wrangham argues that cooking food made digestion easier and so the human gut could grow smaller compared to other non-human primates. The enormous energy previously spent on digestion then allowed the human brain to grow larger. The advantages to cooking food were not just biological. The social changes to human life were revolutionary. Gathering around a fire required socializing, calmed the human temperament, and fostered cooperative living.
Not only did cooking food become biologically and culturally important some 500,000 years ago, but it seems that it also became psychologically important to our species. Taming fire and using it to cook food not only had profound evolutionary consequences, but profound psychological consequences as well. The act of finding food, gathering around the fire, cooking and consuming it, is a profoundly important experience, not just to the body, but to the self. It is around the fire, or the hearth, or the dinner table, that community happens (Cargill, 2012). “When fire and food combined … an almost irresistible focus was created for communal life … The enhanced value cooking imparts to food elevates it above nourishment and opens up new imaginative possibilities: meals can be sacrificial sharings, love-feasts, ritual acts, occasions for the magical transformations wrought by fire – one of which is the transformation of competitors into a community” (Fernández-Armesto, 2001: 13). In other words, cooking is what civilized the species.
Other recent work in food and psychology has been Brian Wansink’s research at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, extraordinary both in its findings, as well as in its implications for the obesity crisis. Wansink’s Mindless Eating (2006) specifically focuses on consumer behavior and examines the myriad contextual cues, often very subtle, which prompt people to overeat. Wansink has ingeniously designed a lab that functions as a working restaurant, which allows him to conduct controlled experiments in a “real world” setting, where most diners presumably behave similarly to how they would in a real restaurant. For example, in his “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, Wansink rigs a device that allows a soup bowl to be discreetly and continuously refilled (as it’s being eaten from). Diners who have the “bottomless bowl” continue to eat 73 percent more soup than diners with a regular bowl of soup without perceiving they are overeating.
In another series of experiments, Wansink found that when given a large free tub of popcorn, moviegoers ate more than those with the smaller container, even when the popcorn in both conditions was 14 days old. The implications for this research is simply enormous from a public policy perspective. For example, the USDA’s Smarter Lunchroom Initiative, which does things like redesign school cafeterias and rename vegetable dishes, is based on these findings. Other findings include the discovery that children paying in cash in school lunch rooms purchase 30 percent more healthy food than when they pay with debit cards (Just and Wansink, 2009).
Also in the area of obesity, Adam Drewnowski has focused extensively on the relationship between poverty and obesity and the links between obesity and diabetes rates as moderated by access to healthy foods in vulnerable populations. This more recent epidemiological work has come on the heels of decades of his research on taste function and food preferences, including the perception of bitter and sweet, as well as the texture of fat. His work on the behavioral phenotype in human obesity examined how the development of obesity is influenced by family risk, but modified by dietary choice.
Yale psychologist Kelly Brownell, who directs the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, has done extensive research on food and public policy. Most recently he has examined the effect of taxing sugared soda and has lobbied extensively for states to implement such a tax in order to reduce consumption and generate revenue (Andreyeva, Chaloupka, and Brownell, 2011; Brownell and Ludwig, 2011). He has examined nutrition-related claims on breakfast cereals and how they influence parents’ willingness to buy them (Schwartz, Vartanian, Wharton and Brownell, 2008), as well as the influence of licensed characters on packaged foods on children’s snack preferences (Roberto, Baik, Harris and Brownell, 2010). Brownell has also been actively involved in the movement to provide nutritional information to consumers at chain restaurants and has conducted outcome research on its effects (Roberto, Schwartz and Brownell, 2009; Roberto, Larsen, Agnew, Balk and Brownell, 2010). Most recently Brownell and his associates have examined whether food can be addictive in the same ways as drugs and alcohol, specifically whether or not there are neural correlates between eating and drug use (Gearhardt, Grilo, DiLeone, Brownell, and Potenza 2011). Findings have shown that foods stimulate the same dopamine reward pathways as many drugs. In related research, the Rudd Center has developed and validated a Food Addiction Scale (Gearhardt, Corbin and Brownell, 2009) that can be used by clinicians and other researchers.
Neuropsychologists who study food and eating often focus on both smell and taste since they are tandem sensory processes. Much interesting research has been conducted on how the brain processes, encodes, and responds to odor and taste. For example, the “Proust Phenomenon” (Chu and Downes, 2000, 2002) refers to how odors, usually food odors, have the ability to cue very specific types of memories. Research on this phenomenon has found that food smells have an extraordinary capacity to trigger autobiographical memories. Not only do they trigger autobiographical memories, but old (in some studies 40-year-old memories), vivid, and emotional memories. Interestingly, Proustian type memories are associated with a specific stage of development, age six to ten years. Chu and Downes tested a hypothesis called “differential cue affordance value,” which says that different sensory modalities carry different cue affordances – or the efficiency with which they access autobiographical memories. Olfaction was found to have a more powerful cue affordance and to retrieve memories that were much older than visual or verbal cues. One explanation is that the olfactory bulb projects to a number of structures involved in memory, hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus.
Research methodologies in the psychology of food almost exclusively involve laboratory-based, experimental research. While it is not essential that a new researcher in this area use this approach, it is by far what dominates mainstream academic psychology publications. A.W. Logue, in the aforementioned classroom text on the psychology of eating and drinking, focuses almost entirely on controlled studies with rats. Brian Wansink, in his Mindless Eating, uses analogue studies in which participants are brought into his “restaurant,” i.e. the lab that is part of his Cornell research facility. Drewnowski conducts quantitative research, sometimes in laboratory settings and sometimes using naturalistic observations in fast food restaurants or grocery stores. Reflecting dominant trends in psychology, the research that is quantitative and advances “psychology as a science” currently dominates the field.
Additionally, there remains theoretical scholarship and qualitative research that uses field-based and/or naturalistic modes of inquiry, more characteristic of anthropology. Paul Rozin’s earlier research, for example on the acquisition of taste preferences for chili peppers in Mexico, falls into this category (Rozin et al., 1982; Rozin, Mark, and Schiller, 1982). Wrangham’s research on the socializing effect of cooking in early humans, i.e., how we were tamed by the use of fire, uses archeological data to support his theory.
As food studies research expands in psychology I expect also to see the expansion of multi-method studies, particularly those with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Many studies coming out in the journal Food, Culture, and Society, for example, are collaborative studies by scholars in different disciplines, such as social sciences and nutrition. These kinds of collaborations not only provide rich, cross-validating data sets, but also stand to serve students interested in food studies who can learn multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives by taking one class or by being involved in one research study. The central message though, to anyone looking at a future in food studies, is simply that in psychology there is room for any methodological approach, so long as it is rigorous and advances the current knowledge base.
Research on the psychology of food is ripe for innovation and growth, and given the wide berth of the discipline, there is room for inquiry in social, cultural, and biological fields of study. Interdisciplinary research is at the forefront of food scholarship, quite simply because of the myriad factors that influence food choice and eating.
Obesity and nutrition will continue to be two major areas of research. Where there will be a great need is in outcome research to assess the vast array of policy measures currently being implemented to curb obesity. Changes in school lunch programs, happy meals, and nutrition labels, to name a few, are all measures that will require widespread assessment. Additionally, conducting pilot and analogue research on such interventions in focus groups or lab settings is also crucial in designing such programs. Much of this research can also be informed by behavioral economics, which includes the very powerful determinant of one’s economic situation on one’s food choice. Drewnowski and Specter (2004), for example, demonstrate how previous food scarcity is correlated to obesity, because one’s history of food uncertainty “teaches” one to consume as much as possible when food is abundant to stave off future starvation. The better we understand predictors and correlates of overeating, both at the individual and societal level, the better we can educate people and shape public policy to help curb this problem.
Advances in neuropsychology and the understanding of the human brain will also open many doors for food psychologists. Simply developing a better understanding of the complex relationship among all of the senses, but particularly taste and smell, has vast implications for the diagnosis and treatment of many psychiatric and medical disorders. Evaluating medicinal and/or preventive effects of certain foods on memory functions, for example, is another promising area of research. Some current correlational research, for example, has found a relationship between curry consumption, specifically yellow curry and its key ingredient turmeric, and a reduced likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia in older adults (Ng et al., 2006). Also understanding the ways in which food, particularly sweet, salty, fatty foods, activate pleasure centers in the brain are essential in understanding obesity and overeating.
Continued work in evolutionary psychology will allow us to better understand our species’ history of cooking and food. We need to continue to answer questions about how and why our dietary paths deviated from ancestral humans and other primates. Using fossils, archaeological evidence, and DNA to piece together longer evolution of adaptive eating behavior has tremendous implications.
Rapid globalization also opens up many research questions for food psychologists. How has culinary tradition historically contributed to the development of ethnic identity and how does that change with rapidly shifting migration patterns? Another place in which globalization (and over-population) converge with psychology is with the issue of sustainability, specifically the psychology of how Westerners, accustomed to prosperity and broad choices, will respond to dietary changes based on shifts in the food supply chain. For example, a recent New Yorker article chronicles entomaphagy (insect eating) and its rise in haute culinary circles, as well as its sustainability. While insect eating might be one of the most sustainable food practices, the biggest obstacle is convincing Westerners who aren’t reality TV stars to do it. Here, work such as Paul Rozin’s on disgust (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, 1993) has very practical implications for potential behavior modification.
In cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, the study of how certain foods and spices affect the brain and body is extremely promising. The aforementioned research on curry (turmeric) as a potential anti-Alzheimer’s agent has enormous dietary and public health implications. Historically there has not been much empirical support for supplements or holistic medicine, but results from these recent studies suggest that there is tremendous potential in this area.
These are simply a few possible, and somewhat obvious trajectories in the psychology of food. There are so many exciting ideas, methodologies, and approaches that it’s impossible to predict what innovation is around the corner.
Ideally one might start focusing on food research beginning in graduate school, although in many cases that is challenging simply because there aren’t a large number of programs with such foci. The University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste offers courses in chemosensory clinical phenomenon to students in a variety of graduate programs, but does not currently offer its own graduate program of study. Students with an experimental focus might want to train with Brian Wansink at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab or Paul Rozin at University of Pennsylvania, two of the most established researchers in food psychology. Barring that, any quality training in rigorous qualitative or quantitative methodologies can be applied to food as a topic. One could theoretically become a food scholar in almost any area of psychology: social, cognitive, evolutionary, clinical, developmental, etc.
For those interested in clinical training in this area, Bastyr University offers a masters degree program in nutrition and clinical health psychology that integrates training in mental health counseling and nutritional counseling. Bastyr focuses on natural health arts and sciences, including naturopathic medicine and oriental medicine. Another applied area of note is clinical neuropsychology as it relates to smell and taste disorders. For example, in their recent book, Navigating Smell and Taste Disorders (2011), physician Ronald DeVere and food consultant Marjorie Calvert collaborate to develop treatments, recipes, and food preparation strategies for those with smell and taste disorders. Such intersections among nutrition, psychology, and medicine are only just being explored. Those with such applied clinical interests could pursue a variety of programs in nutrition, neuropsychology, or clinical health psychology for training.
At this time there are no programs, scholarships, or funding aimed specifically at studying the psychology of food. There are, however, many grants available for obesity and nutrition researchers.
In addition to the key readings listed below, some other good resources are the Cornell Food and Brand Lab website, which summarizes key findings, has a trove of teaching tools, and links to numerous YouTube videos that show the research in action. Another excellent resource is Dr Kelly Brownell’s Open Yale course on the psychology, biology, and politics of food. This course has 23 sessions of 75 minutes each, which can be downloaded in either video or audio format. Also, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity contains full text articles of most of its research, along with policy recommendations, and current initiatives.
In sum, psychology and food studies spans virtually every “sub-discipline” of the field. Methodologies vary and the utility of the scholarship spans from cultural and ethnic facets of food experiences to the neuronal level of how our brains respond to specific tastes, smells, and ingredients. Attention to food is rapidly expanding, with implications for clinical treatment, public policy development, and policy evaluation.
Brownell, K. D. (n.d.) The psychology, biology, and politics of food (Yale Open Course). oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food (accessed on October 12, 2011).
Capaldi, E. D. (1996) Why we eat what we eat: The psychology of eating (1st ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Cornell University Food and Brand Labs. (n.d.) foodpsychology.cornell.edu/discoveries.html (accessed on October 11, 2011).
Freud, A. (1946) “The psychoanalytic study of infantile feeding disturbances.” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2: 119–32.
Logue, A. W. (2004) The Psychology of Eating and Drinking. New York: Brunner-Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Rozin, P. (2007) “Food and eating.” In Handbook of Cultural Psychology. S. Kitayama and D. Cohen eds., pp. 391–416. New York: Guilford Press.
Rudd center for food policy and obesity (n.d.) oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food (accessed on October 12, 2011).
Wansink, B. (2006) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think. New York: Bantam Books.
Andreyeva, T., F. J. Chaloupka, and K. D. Brownell, (2011) Estimating the potential of taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages to reduce consumption and generate revenue. Preventive Medicine, 52(6), 413–16.
Barrett, D. (2007) Waistland: The (R)evolutionary Science Behind our Weight and Ftness Crisis (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Brownell, K. D. (n.d.) The psychology, biology, and politics of food (Yale Open Course). http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food, accessed on October 12, 2011.
Brownell, K. D. and D. S. Ludwig, (2011) The supplemental nutrition assistance program, soda, and USDA policy: Who benefits? Journal of the American Medical Association 306(12), 1370–71.
Capaldi, E. D. (1996) Why We Eat What We Eat: The Psychology of Eating (1st ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Cargill, K. (2007) Desire, ritual, and cuisine. The Psychoanalytic Review 94(2), 315–32.
——(2012) Food, consumption, and the psychology of cooking. In R. S. Stewart & S. Korol eds., Food for Thought: A Multidisciplinary Look at Food in our World. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press.
Chu, S. and J. J. Downes, (2000) Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: Psychological investigations of Proustian phenomena. Chemical Senses 25(1), 111–16.
——(2002) Proust nose best: Odors are better cues of autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 30(4), 511–18.
Cornell university food and brand lab. (n.d.) http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/discoveries.html, accessed on October 11, 2011.
DeVere, R. and M. Calvert (2011) Navigating Smell and Taste Disorders. New York: Demos Health.
Drewnowski, A. (1996) The behavioral phenotype in human obesity. In E. D. Capaldi (ed.), Why we eat what we eat: The psychology of eating (pp. 291–308). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Drewnowski, A. and Specter, S. E. (2004) Poverty and obesity: The role of energy density and energy costs. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79: 6–16.
Fernández-Armesto, F. (2001) Food: A History. London: Macmillan.
Freud, A. (1946) The psychoanalytic study of infantile feeding disturbances. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2: 119–32.
Gearhardt, A. N., W. R. Corbin, and K. D. Brownell (2009) Preliminary validation of the Yale food addiction scale. Appetite 52(2): 430–36.
Gearhardt, A. N., C. M. Grilo, R. J. DiLeone, K. D. Brownell, and M. N. Potenza (2011) Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction 106(7): 1208–12.
Goodyear, D. (2011) Grub. New Yorker 87(24): 38–46.
Haidt, J., P. Rozin, C. McCauley, and S. Imada (1997) Body, psyche, and culture: The relationship between disgust and morality. Psychology and Developing Societies 9: 107–31.
Just, D. R. and B. Wansink (2009) Better school meals on a budget: Using behavioral economics and food psychology to improve meal selection. Choices 24(3): 19–24.
Logue, A. W. (2004) The Psychology of Eating and Drinking. New York: Brunner-Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Ng, T., P. Chiam, T. Lee, H. Chua, L. Lim, and E. Kua (2006) Curry consumption and cognitive function in the elderly. American Journal of Epidemiology 164(9): 898–906.
Roberto, C. A., J. Baik, J. L. Harris, and K. D. Brownell (2010) Influence of licensed characters on children’s taste and snack preferences. Pediatrics Pediatrics 126(1): 88–93.
Roberto, C. A., M. B. Schwartz, and K. D. Brownell (2009) Rationale and evidence for menu-labeling legislation. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 37(6): 546–51.
Roberto, C. A., P. D. Larsen, H. Agnew, J. Baik, and K. D. Brownell (2010) Evaluating the impact of menu labeling on food choices and intake. American Journal of Public Health 100(2): 312.
Rozin, P. (1996) Sociocultural influences on human food selection. In E. D. Capaldi (Ed.), Why we eat what we eat: The psychology of eating (pp. 233–63). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
——(2007) Food and eating. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen eds., Handbook of Cultural Psychology, pp. 391–416. New York: Guilford Press.
Rozin, P. and D. Schiller (1980) The nature and acquisition of a preference for chili pepper by humans. Motivation and Emotion 4(1): 77–101.
Rozin, P., L. Ebert, and J. Schull (1982) Some like it hot: A temporal analysis of hedonic responses to chili pepper. Appetite 3(1): 13–22.
Rozin, P., J. Haidt, and C. R. McCauley, (1993) Disgust. In Handbook of Emotions, M. Lewis and J. Haviland eds., pp. 575–94. New York: Guilford.
Rozin, P., K. Kabnick, E. Pete, C. Fischler, and C. Shields (2003) The ecology of eating smaller portion sizes in France than in the United States help explain the French paradox. Psychological Science 14(5): 450–54.
Rozin, P., M. Mark, and D. Schiller, (1980) The role of desensitization to capsaicin in chili pepper ingestion and preference. Chemical Senses, 6(1): 23–31.
Rudd center for food policy and obesity. (n.d.) http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food, accessed on October 12, 2011.
Schwartz, M. B., L. R. Vartanian, C.M. Wharton, and K. D. Brownell (2008) Examining the nutritional quality of breakfast cereals marketed to children. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 108(4): 702–5.
Volkan, V. D. (1997) Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wansink, B. (2006) Mindless Eating: Why we Eat More than we Think. New York: Bantam Books.
Wrangham, R. W. (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human. New York: Basic Books.