cue exposure

Please, take a generous piece of chocolate (or something else that is lovely to eat), keep it under your nose, push it almost against your nose, smell intensely and keep doing this for about 5 minutes. It will surprise you how strong and how nice the chocolate smells.
Smelling so intensively to tasty food will trigger strong appetite in some people. The smell of the food makes their mouth water, in particular when they are a bit hungry. This group of people responds extremely well to the smell of the food, and in a nutshell it may be said that they show cue reactivity. Cue reactivity refers to the subject’s responses to the smell and taste of the food cues. People that show increased responding to the cues, tend to eat more of the food.
Apart from these responders, there is a group of people that quickly has had enough of the chocolate smell. After smelling the snack for a while, they get less appetite instead of more, and they will eat less after intensive smelling.
Often the people that show a tendency to overeat are the ones that respond strongly to food cues like smell and taste. These can be people with eating disorders, or overweight people, but also people that try to restrain their door intake are increased responders. In one line of research, we study the role of cue reactivity in overeating, eating disorders and obesity. In short, we hypothesize that strong cue reactivity facilitates the overeating and we have some empirical data that supports this hypothesis. We are also curious to know whether this is the same for overweight children.


The cue reactivity model of overeating has imperative consequences for the treatment of overeating. Because the overeating follows strong responding to cues like the smell and taste of food, the overeating is expected to decrease when extreme responses to food diminish, in other words when cue reactivity extinguishes. How do we manage that?
Why makes a delicious smell water your mouth? That happens because your body prepares for the intake of food. Additional saliva is helpful for the digestion of the food. But the body only prepares for food after it has learned that the smell of food also means the eating the food. At the moment that the smell of a delicious food not automatically means that the food will be eaten, the body will not respond anymore to the smell of the delicious food. The learned association between smelling and eating can be unlearned by enduring exposure to food cues like the smell of food without eating. We call this cue exposure with response prevention (no eating). We developed a cue exposure treatment protocol for patients with bulimia nervosa and overweight binge eaters. Together with the Community Health Center Maastricht we test the effectiveness of the treatment protocol.