Food Commercials - I need an expert

[julien]

My science project is "How does watching commercials affect one's appetite for food. I am currently making my BackGround Research Paper and need an expert for help. So, if anyone could help me answer one or more of the following questions, it would be appriciated.
The questions are:

What creates and triggers hunger?
How do commercials appeal to kids?
How does a food commercial affect one's memory and choice of food?

Please reply.

[htb]

Julien,
it's an interesting topic, and one that has been studied quite a bit. Psychology is a large component of commercial marketing, so many large commercial organizations pour a great deal of money into understanding what triggers appetite and "cravings". There are plenty of resources for these studies, although some of the "primary literature" (e.g. published in peer-reviewed journals) might assume that you know quite a bit about it already so they might not be the best places to start.

here are a couple of places you might find interesting:
http://myphlip1.pearsoncmg.com/tutorial ... ste06.html
http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/

- you might also search for "consumer psychology", "psychology of television" or something similar.

Are you doing a science fair project with this, or just a report paper?

[julein]

Thanks for the websites, they're really helpful. And to answer your question, I am doing a paper and an experiment. But right now I am looking for an interview.

[htb]

I can think of quite a few experiments you could do for the project, but none are particularly easy. Usually these kinds of experiments require interviewing or testing a large number of people to gain a degree of confidence in the results. Still, it's doable.

One idea would be to tape a series of commercials using your VCR (if you have one)-- make sure to include at least one food commercial that features something yummy. Then round up your volunteers, and ask each to view the tape. Afterwards, you could give them a survey to answer, and correlate their response with the commercials they viewed. This would be best done using at least 3 tapes with multiple commercials on each tape: two tapes would have a single food commercial somewhere in the mix of non-food commercials, and the food commercials would be different from each other. The third would have no food commercials. That way you could have a control group (no food commercial) and two separate food commercials that your viewers could respond to.

best of luck,
~htb

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestions. I was thinking of doing about the same idea as you. But I had not worked out the details... Using different tapes and only commercial sounds a good idea.