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While research published earlier this month found that bigger bowls tend to make children want larger portions of food, new research suggests that some youngsters might be weaker towards the phenomenon than others.
In fact, investigators from the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab report that kids respond differently to environmental cues, such as plate and bowl size, based on whether or not they are introverted or extroverted anyway. Their findings appear in the journal PLoS ONE.
As a part of their study, they checked out the breakfast behaviors of children between six and 10. Adults serving the children breakfast gave them a large bowl, asked the kids to indicate how much milk and cereal they wanted, and then served them accordingly. Then on another day, the kids received either a small or large bowl and were able to serve themselves just as much cereal and milk because they wanted.
“To determine each child’s personality type, four teachers and counselors rated each child’s degree of introversion and extroversion on a scale of just one to 9,” officials in the laboratory said. “Researchers used the typical of those scores to classify each child being an introvert or an extravert. To determine the amount of food children requested or served themselves, researchers weighed each student’s serving through scales hidden within the table.”
The researchers then compared the serving sizes for introverts and extraverts, and found that extroverted children were much more apt to be impacted by the size of the bowl when getting their very own cereal. Those kids served 33.1 percent more breakfast in the large bowl, while introverted youngsters only served themselves 5.6 percent more when the size of the bowl increased.
“This indicates that the extroverted kids were more influenced by the external cue of bowl-size than introverted kids were. This benefit for introverted kids, however, is only present when serving themselves; when served by adults, all kids requested more cereal to fill up the large bowl than the normal size bowl,” the university said.
“Extroverted children appear to be highly influenced by environmental cues when serving themselves, filling their big bowls towards the brim when left responsible for their own portions,” it added. “These extraverts may benefit from through an adult serve. Introverted kids, however, are not as likely to base portions on bowl size only if serving themselves, so parents may want to allow young introverts to serve their own food to prevent dish-size bias.”
In the prior study, a team of American and Dutch researchers served 69 preschoolers a sugary cereal in either an eight-ounce bowl or perhaps a 16-ounce bowl. The investigators filled the bowl with cereal and milk in small increments, each time asking the children whether or not they had enough food or wanted more.
They stopped only when the kids indicated that these were happy with the quantity of cereal and milk within the bowl. The study says larger bowls correlated to children requesting typically 87 percent more cereal, no matter age, gender, and the body mass index (BMI). The research was published in The Journal of Pediatrics.
