The sound of silence: Presence and absence of sound affects meal duration and hedonic eating experience

Enhancing Psychophysiological Well-Being Through Nature-Based Soundscapes: An Examination of Heart Rate Variability in a Cross-Over Study

Stress and psychological disorders are substantial public health concerns, necessitating innovative therapeutic strategies. This study investigated the psychophysiological benefits of nature-based soundscapes, drawing on the biophilia hypothesis. Using a randomized, acute cross-over design, 53 healthy participants experienced either a nature-based or a reference soundscape for 10 min, with a 2-min washout period. The nature-based soundscape integrated nature sounds with elements of music to create an immersive nature experience. A calm coffee shop soundscape without discernible speech was selected as a reference to represent a typical urban relaxation environment. Heart rate variability (HRV) was the primary outcome, with exploratory outcomes including heart and respiratory rates, and questionnaires assessing affective well-being, creativity, and belonging. Results showed that the nature-based soundscape significantly improved HRV and reduced heart and respiratory rates, indicating enhanced parasympathetic activity. Participants reported lower feelings of anxiety and depression and increased feelings of comfort, enthusiasm, creativity, and belonging. This study highlights the multifaceted benefits of nature-based soundscapes, suggesting they could serve as easily accessible therapeutic options for promoting immediate recovery and reducing daily stress in healthy individuals.

Normative ratings for the Kitchen and Food Sounds (KFS) database

Sounds are important sensory cues for food perception and acceptance. We developed and validated a large-scale database of kitchen and food sounds (180 stimuli) capturing different stages of preparing, cooking, serving, and/or consuming foods and beverages and sounds of packaging, kitchen utensils, and appliances. Each sound was evaluated across nine subjective evaluative dimensions (random order), including stimuli-related properties (e.g., valence, arousal) and food-related items (e.g., healthfulness, appetizingness) by a subsample of 51 to 64 participants (Mdn = 54; N = 332; 69.6% women, Mage = 27.46 years, SD = 10.20). Participants also identified each sound and rated how confident they were in such identification. Results show that, overall, participants could correctly identify the sound or at least recognize the general sound categories. The stimuli of the KFS database varied across different levels (low, moderate, high) of the evaluative dimensions under analysis, indicating good adequacy to a broad range of research purposes. The correlation analysis showed a high degree of association between evaluative dimensions. The sociodemographic characteristics of the sample had a limited influence on the stimuli evaluation. Still, some aspects related to food and cooking were associated with how the sounds are evaluated, suggesting that participants' proficiency in the kitchen should be considered when planning studies with food sounds. Given its broad range of stimulus categories and evaluative dimensions, the KFS database (freely available at OSF ) is suitable for different research domains, from fundamental (e.g., cognitive psychology, basic sensory science) to more applied research (e.g., marketing, consumer science).

The Impact of Modifiable Preoral Factors on Swallowing and Nutritional Outcomes in Healthy Adults: A Scoping Review

PURPOSE

Swallowing has previously been characterized as consisting of four phases; however, it has become apparent that these four phases are not truly discrete and may be influenced by factors occurring prior to bolus entrance into the oral cavity (i.e., preoral factors). Still, the relationship between these factors and swallowing remains poorly understood. The aim of this review was to synthesize and characterize the literature pertaining to the influence of preoral factors on swallowing and nutritional outcomes in healthy individuals.

METHOD

We performed a scoping review, searching the databases of PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane, and Scopus. Search terms included those related to swallowing, experience of preoral factors, and exclusionary terminology to reduce animal and pediatric literature. Our initial search revealed 5,560 unique articles, of which 153 met our inclusionary criteria and were accepted into the review.

RESULTS

Of the accepted articles, 78% were focused exclusively on nutritional outcomes, 17% were focused on both swallowing and nutritional outcomes, and 5% were focused on solely swallowing outcomes. Of the preoral factors examined, 99% were exteroceptive in nature (17% olfactory, 44% visual, 21% auditory, 7% tactile, 11% other), while 1% were proprioceptive in nature.

CONCLUSIONS

This review supports the influence of preoral factors on swallowing and nutritional outcomes. However, there is a large emphasis on the visual modality and on nutritional outcomes. Nearly none of the literature found in this review directly measured swallowing safety, efficiency, or physiology. Future work will benefit from a larger focus on proprioceptive preoral factors as they relate to swallowing outcomes.

Music as an alternative self-regulation strategy to snack foods following a negative mood induction in 5-7-year-old children: Interactions with parental use of food as a reward

This study aimed to extend studies that have looked at snack food consumption following a negative mood induction, and examine whether listening to a happy song would counteract food consumption in children. A second aim was to examine whether parental feeding practices (use of food as a reward and the use of food to regulate emotions) and child Body Mass Index (BMI) would moderate any differences. Eighty 5-7-year-old children took part in a negative mood induction and were then assigned to either a happy music condition or a silent control condition. The weight (g) consumed of four snack foods was measured (fruit hearts, crisps, chocolate biscuits, and breadsticks). Parents filled in baseline measures of feeding practices. There were no significant differences in food consumption between conditions. There was, however, a significant interaction between the high use of food as a reward and the condition on the amount of food eaten. In particular, following a negative -mood induction, those children whose parents reported using food as a reward and who were in the silent condition ate significantly more snack foods. There were no significant interactions with child BMI or with parental use of food to regulate emotions. This research suggests that the use of certain parental strategies may influence how children respond to novel emotion regulation techniques. Further research is needed to evaluate the best types of music to regulate emotions in children, and whether parents can be encouraged to replace maladaptive feeding practices with more adaptive non-food practices.

What's on your plate? Collecting multimodal data to understand commensal behavior

Eating is a fundamental part of human life and is, more than anything, a social activity. A new field, known as Computational Commensality has been created to computationally address various social aspects of food and eating. This paper illustrates a study on remote dining we conducted online in May 2021. To better understand this phenomenon, known as Digital Commensality, we recorded 11 pairs of friends sharing a meal online through a videoconferencing app. In the videos, participants consume a plate of pasta while chatting with a friend or a family member. After the remote dinner, participants were asked to fill in the Digital Commensality questionnaire, a validated questionnaire assessing the effects of remote commensal experiences, and provide their opinions on the shortcomings of currently available technologies. Besides presenting the study, the paper introduces the first Digital Commensality Data-set, containing videos, facial landmarks, quantitative and qualitative responses. After surveying multimodal data-sets and corpora that we could exploit to understand commensal behavior, we comment on the feasibility of using remote meals as a source to build data-sets to investigate commensal behavior. Finally, we explore possible future research directions emerging from our results.