Role of Appetitive Motivation and Sex Differences in Inhibition Response to Food Cues

Appetitive motivation is the drive to eat to obtain pleasure in the absence of . The present study aimed to compare women and men with high and low appetitive motivation in terms of inhibition to food cues. Utilizing a causal-comparative design, fifty-nine healthy and normal weight students with high and low scores in the Power of Food Scale (PFS), who were selected from 1300 students, performed a go/no-go task of food and non-food related pic- tures to measure inhibition. Factorial ANOVA showed that women with high appetitive motivation had higher commission errors in exposure to food pictures than non-food pictures. Decreased inhibition in women with high appetitive motivation could be the result of food cues that overstimulate appetitive motivation.