Startling Sweet Temptations: Hedonic Chocolate Deprivation Modulates Experience, Eating Behavior, and Eyeblink Startle Jens Blechert 1 , Eva Naumann 2 , Julian Schmitz 2 , Beate M. Herbert 3 , Brunna Tuschen-Caffier 2 * 1 Department for Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Heath Psychology, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria, 2 Department for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 3 Department of Health Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany Abstract Many individuals restrict their food intake to prevent weight gain. This restriction has both homeostatic and hedonic effects but their relative contribution is currently unclear. To isolate hedonic effects of food restriction, we exposed regular chocolate eaters to one week of chocolate deprivation but otherwise regular eating. Before and after this hedonic deprivation, participants viewed images of chocolate and images of high-calorie but non-chocolate containing foods, while experiential, behavioral and eyeblink startle responses were measured. Compared to satiety, hedonic deprivation triggered increased chocolate wanting, liking, and chocolate consumption but also feelings of frustration and startle potentiation during the intertrial intervals. Deprivation was further characterized by startle inhibition during both chocolate and food images relative to the intertrial intervals. Individuals who responded with frustration to the manipulation and those who scored high on a questionnaire of impulsivity showed more relative startle inhibition. The results reveal the profound effects of hedonic deprivation on experiential, behavioral and attentional/appetitive response systems and underscore the role of individual differences and state variables for startle modulation. Implications for dieting research and practice as well as for eating and weight disorders are discussed. Citation: Blechert J, Naumann E, Schmitz J, Herbert BM, Tuschen-Caffier B (2014) Startling Sweet Temptations: Hedonic Chocolate Deprivation Modulates Experience, Eating Behavior, and Eyeblink Startle. PLoS ONE 9(1): e85679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085679 Editor: Giuseppe di Pellegrino, University of Bologna, Italy Received May 21, 2013; Accepted December 5, 2013; Published January 9, 2014 Copyright: ß 2014 Blechert et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: tuschen@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de Introduction In today’s industrialized societies, characterized by the omni- presence of high-energy food and a sedentary lifestyle, many individuals struggle with overweight and obesity. Also normal weight individuals are concerned about their body shape and weight, due to an unrealistically thin body shape ideal particularly in young women [1,2]. Both cases often lead to the attempt to control or reduce weight via restriction of caloric intake. However, what seems like a straightforward act of self-regulation often turns into a boomerang: dieting might reduce weight short term but also results in a number of physiological and psychological changes that increase the probability that weight is regained in the long run, e.g., [3]. While much research effort is invested into the physiological/homeostatic systems underlying appetite and ingestion, the psychological/hedonic mechanisms have only recently been recognized by a wider literature, e.g., [4,5]. Food Deprivation: Homeostatic vs. Hedonic Processes Biomedical research has now gathered considerable knowledge about the homeostatic effects of caloric restriction: abstinence from any food intake for anywhere between 2 and 48 hrs, goes along with substantial increases in appetitive responding across multiple response systems. Partially redundant gut hormone systems sense homeostatic deprivation effects and communicate with the hypothalamus and higher brain systems through several bidirec- tional pathways [6]. These hormonal adaptations are paralleled by changes in other responses systems such as in implicit food evaluation [7,8], salivation [9], interoception and autonomic responding [10,11], visual attentional processing [12], as well as neural reward system activity [13,14,15,16] among others. Thus, the body attentional, experiential and motivational systems are attuned for food search to secure caloric balance. But are all these dieting effects mediated by physiological/ homeostatic systems? If hedonic factors play a role, what is their contribution to the above described deprivation effects? More broadly, is it the ‘mind or the metabolism’ (Berthoud, [17]) that drives these effects? This is difficult to answer, because homeostatic and hedonic aspects of food processing are confounded in conventional studies of food deprivation or of interindividual differences related to food intake. In the present research we introduce a manipulation of hedonic hunger through a hedonic deprivation, i.e. a selective restriction of a single craved food class - on the background of an otherwise unchanged food intake and therefore constant homeostatic state – and test the hypothesis that this would have substantial effects on experience, motivational/ attentional physiological responding, and eating. If so, this would demonstrate the significance of hedonic factors for dieting. We chose to study chocolate deprivation because chocolate is the most commonly craved food in Western cultures (Hetherington & Macdiarmid, 1993). Furthermore, chocolate is not necessary for a PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 January 2014 | Volume 9 | Issue 1 | e85679 University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany,