Media pressure makes high-calorie food cues feel longer to teen girls

High-calorie food cues stretched perceived time in adolescent girls, revealing how media pressure and body image may shape even basic cognitive processing.

Paper: Beyond calories: the role of media pressure and body appreciation in shaping time perception of food cues in female adolescents. Image Credit: Andrii Yalanskyi / Shutterstock

Adolescence is characterized by an elevated sensitivity to sociocultural factors, including body image and media pressure. In this context, daily stimuli, such as food, may acquire substantial emotional value and trigger desire or anxiety.

Food-related cues may serve as strong emotional triggers for adolescents, particularly in females. Nevertheless, how such stimuli affect fundamental cognitive processes, such as time perception, remains poorly understood.

Media pressure promotes the internalization of a thin ideal, potentially leading to elevated food-related anxiety and chronic body dissatisfaction. Conversely, body appreciation, defined as respecting, protecting, or accepting one’s body irrespective of conformity to beauty ideals, may be protective. It promotes a benevolent relationship with oneself and may act as an emotional and cognitive buffer against external pressures.

About the Study

In the present study, researchers investigated how exposure to food cues influences time perception in female adolescents and how individual differences in perceived media pressure and body appreciation shape this effect. They recruited female adolescents from a private high school in southeastern France for a quasi-experimental pilot study. A computer-based temporal bisection task involving food images was administered.

First, participants were required to distinguish between standard short (400 ms) and long (1600 ms) durations based on non-food control images. Next, five intermediate durations (600–1400 ms) were included in the testing phase alongside the standard short and long durations, and trials were randomly presented without feedback. Temporal stimuli included images of low-calorie and high-calorie foods. After the temporal bisection task, three validated questionnaires were administered.

Sociocultural pressure related to media was assessed using the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ). Body appreciation was evaluated using the Body Appreciation Scale (BAS). The Sick, Control, One, Fat, and Food (SCOFF) questionnaire was used to examine the risk of eating disorders. Participants provided demographic information, including age, height, and weight. Linear associations between variables were assessed using Pearson correlations.

A bisection point (BP) for the temporal bisection task was estimated as the duration reported by participants as “long” 50% of the time. The Weber ratio (WR) was estimated as the ratio of the difference limen to the BP; the difference limen was calculated as the difference between durations corresponding to 75% and 25% long responses. Further, analysis of covariance was used to assess the impact of image type on WR and BP, while controlling for SATAQ or BAS scores.

Findings

The study included 55 females, with a mean age of 16.5 years and a body mass index of 22.1 kg/m². A high proportion of participants (69%) screened positive for eating-disorder risk on the SCOFF questionnaire, although this was not a clinical diagnosis. There was a significant main effect of image type: high-calorie food images led to overestimation of time. No significant effects on the Weber ratio were observed, indicating that the main difference involved perceived duration rather than temporal sensitivity. A significant interaction between the SATAQ score and image type was observed, indicating that the effect of image type was contingent on the level of sociocultural influences.

A linear regression analysis was performed to better understand this interaction effect. This revealed that an increment in the SATAQ score was associated with a higher difference between image types on the BP. That is, the greater the media pressure, the more likely participants were to overestimate time on high-calorie images relative to low-calorie images. This moderation effect persisted after accounting for SCOFF-defined eating-disorder risk. There was no significant effect of image type on BP when controlling for the BAS score.

However, there was a trend toward interaction between image type and BAS score, which did not reach statistical significance. In a post hoc analysis controlling for the risk of eating disorder (i.e., SCOFF score), there was a significant interaction between image type and BAS score. This suggested that as body appreciation increased, the differences between BP decreased after accounting for the risk of eating disorders.

Conclusions

In sum, high-calorie food cues led to an overestimation of duration compared with low-calorie food cues among female adolescents. This temporal distortion was amplified by perceived media pressure but may have been attenuated by increased body appreciation, although the body appreciation finding was strongest only in a post hoc model.

Further research is needed to determine causal relationships and to test whether the findings generalize beyond female adolescents from a single private French high school.

Download your PDF copy by clicking here.

Journal reference:

• Hallez Q, Reyes Pavón D, Flaudias V (2026). Beyond calories: the role of media pressure and body appreciation in shaping time perception of food cues in female adolescents. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-57924-1, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-57924-1