If you consider those sweet temptations as a bigger threat you will resist those tempting cookies, according to a new study.

Researchers at University of Texas at Austin found that your ability to resist that temptation depends on how a big a threat you perceive it to be.

Authors Ying Zhang, Szu-Chi Huang and Susan M. Broniarczyk studied techniques that enable us to resist food and other temptations.

"Four experiments show that when consumers encounter temptations that conflict with their long-term goals, one self-control mechanism is to exaggerate the negativity of the temptation as a way to resist, a process we call counteractive construal," wrote the researchers.

For example, in one study, female participants were asked to estimate the calories in a cookie. Half the participants were told that they have the option of receiving the cookie as a complimentary gift for participation and half were not.

The results showed that consumers with a strong dieting goal construed the cookie as having more calories and being more damaging to the attainment of their long-term goal of losing weight.