Addiction research suggests that attentional bias for addiction-related stimuli may contribute to or help to maintain the addictive behaviour. This study attempts to identify the causal links between food-related attentional biases (FABs), tendency to overeat and restrained eating. One possibility is that FABs simply reflect the incentive salience of food-related stimuli. Alternatively, FABs may arise as a consequence of restrained eaters’ food related goals. This is important since it means that dieting could make it even more difficult to reduce food intake. However, it is likely that previous research in this area has confounded restraint with tendency to overeat, making it difficult to distinguish between these two possibilities. The present study attempts to resolve this problem by employing male and female participants from both western (Britain, n=90; Greece, n=60) and non-western (Iran, n=90) countries to measure FABs (using a food version of the Emotional Stroop Task), restraint and tendency to overeat (using the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire and BMI). The results illuminate the possibilities as to origins of FABs.

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