Abstract
Accumulating laboratory-based evidence indicates that reducing delay discounting (devaluation of delayed outcomes) with the use of episodic future thinking (EFT; mental simulation of future events) improves dietary decision-making and other maladaptive behaviors. Recent work has adapted EFT for use in the natural environment to aid in dietary and weight control by engaging participants in EFT repeatedly throughout the day. These efforts may benefit from minimizing the amount of time required for measurement and implementation of EFT. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk in the present study, we show that EFT effectively reduces delay discounting in overweight/obese participants (N = 131) using the recently developed 5-trial, adjusting-delay discounting task, which can be completed rapidly (25 s) and is therefore ideally suited for ecological momentary assessment. Moreover, measures of delay discounting from this task were strongly correlated with those from the commonly used adjusting-amount task (r = .859). Significant effects of EFT on discounting, however, depended on the number of future events participants generated and imagined. Use of a range of events and future time frames (as is typical in the literature) significantly reduced delay discounting, whereas use of only a single event did not.
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Notes
This estimate reflects completion of 42 choice trials across seven delays (1 day–25 years), administered using the amount titration algorithm described by Du et al. (2002).
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program through an award administered by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (1UH2DK109543-01), awarded to Drs. Epstein and Bickel.
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Dr. Bickel is a principal of HealthSim, LLC and Notifius, LLC; a scientific advisory board member of Sober Grid, Inc. and DxRx, Inc.; and a consultant for ProPhase, LLC and Teva Branded Pharmaceutical Products R&D, Inc. Dr. Epstein is a consultant for and has equity in Kurbo Health. Jeffrey S. Stein, Yan Yan Sze, Liqa Athamneh, and Mikhail N. Koffarnus do not have any real or potential conflict(s) of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.
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Stein, J.S., Sze, Y.Y., Athamneh, L. et al. Think fast: rapid assessment of the effects of episodic future thinking on delay discounting in overweight/obese participants. J Behav Med 40, 832–838 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-017-9857-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-017-9857-8