Making Food Decisions Together: Physiological and Affective Underpinnings of Relinquishing Preferences and Reaching Decisions

Abstract

We used a novel interdisciplinary experimental paradigm where two types of dyads—15 dyads with one depressed and one non-depressed participant and 15 dyads with two non-depressed participants—engaged in a series of food-decision-making tasks. We examined how different communicative events during the decision-making process were reflected in the affective responses of the interacting participants, as indicated in their skin conductance (SC) response rates. The participants’ SC response rates were found to be higher during the emergence of the final decision, compared to the other segments during the process. Furthermore, relinquishing one’s initially expressed preferences was associated with SC response rates higher than the baseline. However, during the relinquishment segments, there was a negative interaction between depression diagnosis and SC response rates, which suggests that, compared to their non-depressed comparisons, it is affectively less arousing for the participants with depression to give up their previously expressed preferences.