Weight Status Differences In Behavior And Neural Responses To Physical Activity Images

Obesity is a chronic disease characterized by the amount of fat increase in the body,obesity is associated with a wide variety of disease,some of which may cause disability or death.Obesity is mainly influenced by diet and physical exercise.Adjustment of diet can easily lead to poor eating habits.Physical exercise can more effectively regulate our lives.In order to learn more about the influence of physical exercise on obesity,we designed two studies explore behavior and brain activation differences to physical exercise images.Study 1: Screen 60 participants online join the subliminal experiment,design 2(obese group and normal weight group)x 2(negative emotional faces and positive emotional faces)x 3(physical exercise images and sedentary activity images and neutral car images)mixed experimental design,in order to find the reaction time difference between obese group and normal weight group.Study 2: Recruit 30 subjects and divide them into obese group and normal weight group according to Asia BMIs.Functional magnetic resonance imaging(FMRI)block experiment is designed.Analysis whether there are significant differences in the activation of the scan area when the subjects are watching three types of images(physical exercise images,sedentary activity images,and neutral car images).Results: The results of study 1 show that negative priming reaction time is longer than positive priming,under negative emotional arousal conditions,the obese group's reaction time to the physical exercise images is shorter than the normal weight group(p=0.034).The finding may indicating that the obese group express more negative to physical exercise than normal weight group.This may be the reason why the obese group does not like sports and getting fatter.The results of study 2 reveal that some motion areas(middle temporal gyrus,postcentral gyrus,fusiform gyrus)are activated during scanning of the whole brain,as well as the limbic cingulate and anterior cingulate gyrus were also activated indicated that the obese group activate more negative affect areas than the normal weight group.Conclusion: Obese group shows more negative emotions to physical exercise cues than normal weight groups.