A Role for Mental Imagery in the Experience and Reduction of Food Cravings

The term “craving” refers to a strong motivational state, which compels an individual to seek and ingest a particular substance (1). It usually refers to alcohol, tobacco, or drugs, but has become increasingly applied to food. Thus, food cravings refer to an intense desire or urge to eat a specific food (2). It is this specificity that distinguishes a craving from ordinary food choices and hunger (3). In Western societies, the most commonly craved foods are those high in fat, sugar, and salt, such as cake, chips, pizza, ice-cream, and in particular chocolate (4). Most people experience cravings for such palatable foods on occasion without any problem (5). However, food cravings can pose significant health risks for some people. Most notably, they can contribute to the development of obesity (6) and disordered eating (7), increasingly serious global health issues (8, 9). This has prompted a surge of investigations into the mechanisms that underlie the experience of food craving with a view to developing effective craving reduction techniques. The present paper focuses specifically on cravings for food, and the role of mental imagery in the experience and reduction of such cravings. For excellent reviews of the theoretical underpinnings of craving and addiction more broadly, we refer the reader to recent works by May and colleagues (10, 11). We take a more applied perspective here and critically evaluate the practical significance of imagery-based craving reduction interventions. Over the past decade, a growing body of literature has highlighted a key role for mental imagery in the experience and reduction of food cravings. Experimental and survey data have shown that when people crave, they have vivid images of the desired food, including how delicious it looks and how good it tastes and smells (11–14). For example, when undergraduate students were asked to describe a previous food craving episode, 30% made explicit reference to mental imagery, using phrases such as “I could picture [the pizza] in my mind, picture eating it” (14). In addition, when presented with a list of descriptive statements, respondents strongly endorsed imagery-based descriptors as characteristic of their food cravings. Imagery descriptors in the visual (“I am visualizing the food”), gustatory (“I imagine the taste of the food”), and olfactory (“I imagine the smell of the food”) modalities in particular were rated highly; in contrast, auditory descriptors (“I imagine the sound of myself having it”) were not highly rated (12, 14). Furthermore, when asked to assign specific percentages to each of the five sensory modalities involved in an imagined food craving experience, the visual modality (39.7%) scored the highest, followed by the gustatory (30.6%) and olfactory (15.8%) modalities; by contrast, the tactile (9.5%) and auditory (4.4%) modalities were little used (14). These findings indicate that craving-related food images are predominantly visual, gustatory, and olfactory in nature. Further evidence for the imaginal basis of food cravings comes from studies that have experimentally induced food cravings by instructing participants to imagine a food-related scenario (e.g., “Imagine you are eating your favorite food”) (15). Moreover, the strength of participants’ food cravings has been shown to correlate with the vividness of their appetitive images (16). In line with these empirical observations, a recent cognitive model of craving, the Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire (17), has placed vivid sensory images of the appetitive target at the very heart of the craving experience. According to this theory, sensory images are a key component of the cognitive elaboration that follows an initial intrusive thought about the craved substance. More general cognitive psychological research has shown that the generation and maintenance of mental images (of whatever kind) can be disrupted by competing cognitive activities in the same sensory modality. For example, performing a visual task (e.g., watching a flickering pattern of black and white dots, termed dynamic visual noise) reduces the vividness of imagined objects or scenes, whereas engaging in a verbal task (e.g., counting aloud) reduces the vividness of imagined sounds (18). This occurs because of mutual competition between task performance and image maintenance for limited-capacity, modality-specific cognitive resources. Clinical applications of this dual-task methodology have shown that interference by a concurrent visual task can successfully reduce the vividness and emotional impact of distressing autobiographical images, characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (19–23). Applications in the craving domain have similarly shown that competing cognitive tasks can disrupt desire-related mental images, and thereby can suppress cravings for alcohol, tobacco, and food. Notably, tasks that introduce competing information in the same sensory modality as