Carina Schlintl

Who they are

The facts about Carina Schlintl that this site has verified are narrow. She is listed as first author, with Anne Schienle, of the 2020 paper below, and the paper gives the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Graz, Austria, as the authors' home. This page does not describe her wider research, her career or any other publication, because the sources read for it concern one paper and the page does not guess beyond them.

What the paper shows about her work is a method. It is a placebo design applied to colour: instead of asking only whether a colour changes appetite, it asks whether being told what the colour does changes the answer. That is a sensible response to a literature in which the same colours have given opposite results.

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

Suggestion as an experimental variable. The paper treats a verbal claim about a colour as something that can be varied and measured. If a belief about red were driving earlier results, a suggestion should have moved the ratings of red food. It did not.

Tinting costs wanting. Every coloured version of a food picture was wanted less than the original. A reading that is this site's and not the authors' is that the colour a food is known to have matters more than any appetite a hue carries.

Backgrounds did not matter. Colour on the food mattered; colour behind the food did not, which separates the food's own appearance from the setting.

Stated limits. The sample was women only, the outcome was a self-rating of wanting and not eating, and yellow was not among the colours.

---