Abstract: Food craving refers to an intense desire to eat a specific food (or type of food),it is extremely common,close to 100% of young adult females and 70% of young adult males report having experienced one or more food cravings at some point in their lives.Most existing studies have focused on energy-dense food craving like carbohydrate craving and sugar craving.Spicy foods are a mainstay of many culinary food-ways in India,Mexico and China.The phenomenon and mechanism of “spicy food craving” is worthy of investigation because of its unique geographical and cultural features, and close relationship with public health issues.Inhibitory control have a close connection with food craving,low inhibitory control specifically in response to appetitive stimuli is associated with increased craving,which may ultimately result in overeating.The present study adopted the event-related potentials to explore the general and food-related inhibitory control in trait spicy food cravers. The Spicy Food Craving Questionnaire(SFCQ), frequency of spicy food intake were administered to 400 undergraduate from a university in China,participants who scored in the highest quartile on the SFCQ were classified as spicy food cravers(cravers), and those who scored in the lowest quartile on SFCQ were classified as nonspicy food cravers(non-cravers).The final sample consisted of 47 healthy participants(25 cravers,22 non-cravers).A visual Go/Nogo task was established with E-prime software and adopted to test the inhibitory control of the spicy food cravers using behavioural measures and Nogo-N2 ,Nogo-P3 of ERPs.We used two variants of the Go/Nogo task: one to measure food-unrelated response inhibition, and the other to measure response inhibition specifically for spicy food. In the spicy food-specific Go/Nogo task, go stimuli consisted of pictures of nonspicy food,and the no-go stimuli consisted of pictures of spicy food.In the spicy food-unrelated Go/Nogo task, the letter “M” as go stimuli while the letter “W” as no-go signal. The key findings were as follows:(1)There was no significant difference between the spicy food cravers and non-spicy food cravers in the go reaction time and no-go errors,in both two variants of the Go/Nogo task. There was no significant difference in error rates between the two tasks,the spicy food stimulis’ go reaction time were significantly longer than the letter stimulis’,participants have longer reaction time to food stimuli than letter stimuli.(2)In the food-unrelated Go/Nogo task,there was no significant difference in N2 and P3 amplitude between the two groups in correct Nogo trial.(3)In the spicy food-specific Go/Nogo task,the N2a mean amplitude between the two groups in correct Nogo trial was no significant difference,spicy food cravers’ have greater N2b and P3 mean amplitude than controls’ in nogo stimuli ,suggesting that spicy food cravers was an increased recruitment of inhibitory control processes when inhibiting to spicy food stimuli compared to letter. Results showed that spicy food cravers did not differ from non-cravers in general inhibitory control, but had a significantly lower spicy food-related Nogo N2b and P3 than non-craver. This may indicate that they had poor ability in inhibiting responses to spicy food cues.The present study is the first to examin inhibitory control in spicy food cravers,and provided further evidence that food craving have a close relationship with inhibitory control.

Key words: spicy food cravers, inhibitory control, Go/Nogo task, ERPs

摘要： 采用事件相关电位(ERP)技术，探讨一般线索Go/Nogo和辣食线索Go/Nogo任务过程中，辣食渴求者和非辣食渴求者的抑制控制能力。（1）行为结果显示，两组被试辣食线索的反应时和错误率无显著差异，均在任务类型上有差异，即对辣食线索的反应更慢；（2）ERP结果显示，在辣食相关线索Go/Nogo任务中辣食渴求者的N2b和P3波幅都显著小于非辣食渴求者，N2a没有差异；在一般线索Go/Nogo任务中，ERP成分没有发现显著差异。结果提示，辣食渴求者只在辣食相关线索的抑制控制能力弱于非辣食渴求者，这可能意味着他们对辣食线索抑制反应的缺失。

关键词: 辣食渴求者, 抑制控制, Go/Nogo任务, ERPs