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Show 212 Falakesi L. Ika Previous research has demonstrated that people engaged in mental work subsequently take in more excess calories (Chaput&Tremblay, 2007). We are exploring a psychological reason why mental work leads to increased caloric intake, using narratives. Specifically, mental work may be experienced psychologically as making physiological effort, based on ideas from the embodied cognition literature. In order to shift the psychological experience associated with mental work, we are using narrative tasks. Specifically, we are examining whether asking participants to nar-rate their bodily experience when engaged in mental work, versus their mental experience. We are using a repeated measures design with two sessions per participant. In one session partici-pants engage in mental work using a computer-based interface (two different cognitive tasks). In the other, participants engage in a seated-rest session (sitting in a room doing nothing but sitting). Both sessions are held in the same room. In both sessions, after approximately 25 min-utes of rest or work, participants are asked to narrate their activity with either a mental focus or a bodily focus, or, in a control condition, to simply wait for two to three minutes (delay). Then, they are provided with snacks, and asked to complete a series of questionnaires. Participants are ran-domly assigned to either delay or narrative conditions, and have the same narrative task for both sessions. Following the end of each session, when participants have left, the weight of consumed snacks in grams will be recorded. We anticipate that in the delay condition, we will replicate previous work on mental effort and overeating, with participants eating more when having done mental work. For narration, we anticipate that a bodily focus might reduce food consumption by making participants aware that they are actually well rested. Preliminary results on six partici-pants (two per condition) suggest that we are replicating the mental work effect, and moreover, that bodily narration does result in less caloric consumption overall, and eliminates differences between the mental work and seated rest conditions. THE EFFECTS OF MENTAL WORK ON SUBSEQUENT CALORIC INTAKE: NARRATIVE MEANING MAKING Falakesi L. Ika (Monisha Pasupathi) Department of Psychology, Health Science LEAP University of Utah Health sciences leap program spring 2012 Monisha Pasupathi |