Anne Schienle

Who they are

The facts about Anne Schienle that this site has verified are narrow. She is the second author of the 2020 paper below, which gives the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Graz, Austria, as the authors' home. The paper's introduction also cites a 2020 study with Schienle as first author, listed with other work on placebo and suggestion effects on appetite or food cues (doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107843). This site has not read that study and does not describe it. This page does not describe her wider research, because the sources read for it concern one paper.

The Graz experiment sits within a research interest the paper itself states: whether appetite for food can be shifted by what people are told. Colour was the cue chosen because the literature on it was inconsistent.

Key papers

Schlintl, C., & Schienle, A. (2020). 'Effects of coloring food images on the propensity to eat: a placebo approach with color suggestions.' Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 589826. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589826. Published 29 October 2020.

The study asked whether verbal suggestions could strengthen the colour effects on appetite that earlier work had reported inconsistently, namely red increasing it and blue decreasing it. Two experiments used 448 women aged 18 to 35 (mean age 22.54). In the first, 217 women rated pictures of sweet foods shown in their original colours and tinted red, blue, or black and white, which served as the colourless control. In the second, 231 women saw the food on white, red, blue or grey backgrounds. Half of each sample was told that red increases appetite and blue suppresses it. The outcome was a single self-rating on a 7-point scale, answering how much the participant would like to eat the food right now, and the analysis worked from difference scores against the original-colour pictures or the white background. The paper reports that the luminance of the blue and red versions was equivalent.

All the coloured food images reduced food wanting compared with the original colours. The red suggestion did not change ratings of red food. The suggestion further reduced wanting for blue and for black-and-white food. Coloured backgrounds had no effect. The authors concluded that red and blue did not have the predicted opposite effects, and that specific food colours combined with specific suggestions might still help change willingness to eat sweet products.

This page read the published article text through a summarising tool, and the numbers above are those it reported.

Key ideas

Placebo logic applied to appetite. The paper uses verbal suggestion to test whether beliefs about a colour, and not the colour, drive the ratings. The red suggestion did not move ratings of red food.

A consistent null on red. The authors state that red and blue did not have the predicted opposite effects, which puts the study on the cautious side of an inconsistent literature that includes reports of red increasing appetite and of red reducing intake.

What colour did. Tinting a food picture lowered wanting relative to the original colours. The authors note that specific food colours combined with specific suggestions might still help change willingness to eat sweet products.

Stated limits. All 448 participants were women aged 18 to 35, wanting was self-rated, and yellow was not tested.

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