Emotional eating and food intake after sadness and joy (original) (raw)
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Happy eating. The role of positive mood in emotional eating
Emotional eaters are often presumed to eat in response to negative emotions, while positive emotions have been largely neglected. The current study induced a positive, negative, or neutral mood in a student sample and subsequently measured food intake. In addition, the relation between caloric intake and mood improvement was assessed. It was expected that emotional eaters would consume more food than nonemotional eaters in the emotional conditions, and also more than in the neutral condition. Moderated regression analyses indeed showed a significant increase in food intake for emotional eaters in the positive compared to the neutral condition, and a trend towards higher food consumption than non-emotional eaters. No effects were found in the negative condition. With regard to mood changes during food intake, Pearson correlations demonstrated an association between amount of calories consumed and mood improvement after 5 min of food consumption. However, there was no evidence for differences between emotional and non-emotional eaters. The current findings underline the importance of positive emotions in emotional eating, and provide new insights on the relationship between eating and mood melioration.
Happy eating. The underestimated role of overeating in a positive mood
Appetite, 2013
Emotional eaters are often presumed to eat in response to negative emotions, while positive emotions have been largely neglected. The current study induced a positive, negative, or neutral mood in a student sample and subsequently measured food intake. In addition, the relation between caloric intake and mood improvement was assessed. It was expected that emotional eaters would consume more food than nonemotional eaters in the emotional conditions, and also more than in the neutral condition. Moderated regression analyses indeed showed a significant increase in food intake for emotional eaters in the positive compared to the neutral condition, and a trend towards higher food consumption than non-emotional eaters. No effects were found in the negative condition. With regard to mood changes during food intake, Pearson correlations demonstrated an association between amount of calories consumed and mood improvement after 5 min of food consumption. However, there was no evidence for differences between emotional and non-emotional eaters. The current findings underline the importance of positive emotions in emotional eating, and provide new insights on the relationship between eating and mood melioration.
Good mood food. Positive emotion as a neglected trigger for food intake
Appetite, 2013
Research on emotions as a trigger for food intake has mainly been focused on the role of negative emotions. In the present studies the role of positive emotions as a trigger for food intake is investigated in a sample of healthy participants with a normal weight. Two laboratory studies were conducted in which positive emotions or no emotions were induced (Study 1) or in addition negative emotions were induced (Study 2) after which unhealthy food intake was assessed by bogus taste tests. In Study 3, food intake was assessed by registering snack intake in a 7-day diary study together with the emotions accompanying each snacking episode to provide a more ecologically valid test of our hypothesis. Studies 1 and 2 showed that positive emotions, compared to the control conditions, evoked more caloric intake. Dietary restraint did not moderate this effect. Study 2 additionally showed that positive emotions evoked caloric intake to the same extent as negative emotions. Study 3 showed that snack intake in daily life was reported to result from positive emotions more frequently than from negative emotions. Conclusions: Positive emotions serve as an important but under-investigated trigger for unhealthy food intake that deserves further scrutiny. Future research should further investigate whether food intake results from emotional arousal in general, or from emotional valence in particular.
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Whether emotions affect eating, and in whom, has remained unclear. This meta-analysis assessed the effect of emotions on eating in both healthy and eating disordered individuals. Fifty-six experimental studies investigating the causal effect of emotions on eating behavior were selected including 3670 participants. Separate meta-analyses (random models) were performed for negative and positive emotions. Among healthy people the moderating impact of individual differences in restrained and emotional eating and of being overweight or obese was assessed for negative emotions. Results: Restrained eaters showed increased eating in response to negative emotions. Negative emotions did not affect eating in overweight or obese people, people with eating disorders or in self-assessed emotional eaters. Positive emotion resulted in increased eating across groups. Heterogeneity was high and could be explained by differences in emotion induction procedures, eating measures, and age of participants. These findings indicate that particularly restrained eaters are vulnerable to emotion-induced eating. Additional qualitatively good experiments are called for in combination with studies assessing emotion-eating links in people's naturalistic environment.
Behavioural Processes, 2002
The relationship between eating and emotion has always interested researchers of human behavior. This relationship varies according to the particular characteristics of the individual and according to the specific emotional state. We consider findings on the reciprocal interactions between, on the one hand, emotions and food intake, and, on the other, the psychological and emotional consequences of losing weight and dieting. Theories on the relationship between emotions and eating behaviors have their origin in the literature on obesity. The psychosomatic theory of obesity proposes that eating may reduce anxiety, and that the obese overeat in order to reduce discomfort. The internal/external theory of obesity hypothesizes that overweight people do not recognize physiological cues of hunger or satiety because of faulty learning. It thus predicts that normal weight people will alter (either increase or decrease) their eating when stressed, while obese people will eat regardless of their physiological state. The restraint hypothesis postulates that people who chronically restrict their food intake overeat in the presence of disinhibitors such as the perception of having overeaten, alcohol or stress. These theories are examined in the light of present research and their implications on eating disorders are presented. # (E.M. Berry). Behavioural Processes 60 (2002) 157 Á/164 www.elsevier.com/locate/behavproc 0376-6357/02/$ -see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 6 -6 3 5 7 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 8 2 -7
Feeding Your Feelings: Emotion Regulation Strategies and Emotional Eating
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010
The process by which emotions affect eating behavior emerges as one of the central unresolved questions in the field of emotional eating. The present studies address the hypothesis that the regulation strategies people use to deal with these emotions are responsible for increased eating. Negative emotions were induced and intake of comfort food and non-comfort food was measured by means of taste tests. Emotion induction was preceded by measuring individual differences in emotion regulation strategies (Study 1) or by instructions to regulate emotions in either an adaptive (reappraisal) or maladaptive (suppression) manner (Study 2). Study 3 also entailed a control condition without any regulation instructions. Relative to reappraisal and spontaneous expression, suppression led to increased food intake, but only of the comfort foods. Emotions themselves were not responsible for this effect. These findings provide new evidence that the way in which emotions are regulated affects eating behavior.
Emotions and eating. Self-reported and experimentally induced changes in food intake under stress
Appetite, 2009
A growing body of evidence suggests that stress affects health not only through direct physiological processes but also through changes in health behaviours such as food choice and intake. Survey findings indicate that people report increasing intake of high energy snack foods when stressed. For example, Oliver and Wardle (1999) administered a brief questionnaire to examine the relationship between self-reported stress and food intake. Overall, almost equal numbers of respondents reported increased and decreased intake in response to stress. However, stress was associated with increased consumption of high fat, highly palatable snack foods whereas more meal-type foods were consistently reported to be consumed less under conditions of stress. These findings were independent of gender and dieting status.
Eating Behaviors, 2014
Background: Emotional eating is associated with overeating and the development of obesity. Yet, empirical evidence for individual (trait) differences in emotional eating and cognitive mechanisms that contribute to eating during sad mood remain equivocal. Aim: The aim of this study was to test if attention bias for food moderates the effect of self-reported emotional eating during sad mood (vs neutral mood) on actual food intake. It was expected that emotional eating is predictive of elevated attention for food and higher food intake after an experimentally induced sad mood and that attentional maintenance on food predicts food intake during a sad versus a neutral mood. Method: Participants (N = 85) were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental mood induction conditions (sad/neutral). Attentional biases for high caloric foods were measured by eye tracking during a visual probe task with pictorial food and neutral stimuli. Self-reported emotional eating was assessed with the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) and ad libitum food intake was tested by a disguised food offer. Results: Hierarchical multivariate regression modeling showed that self-reported emotional eating did not account for changes in attention allocation for food or food intake in either condition. Yet, attention maintenance on food cues was significantly related to increased intake specifically in the neutral condition, but not in the sad mood condition. Discussion: The current findings show that self-reported emotional eating (based on the DEBQ) might not validly predict who overeats when sad, at least not in a laboratory setting with healthy women. Results further suggest that attention maintenance on food relates to eating motivation when in a neutral affective state, and might therefore be a cognitive mechanism contributing to increased food intake in general, but maybe not during sad mood.
I ate too much so I must have been sad': Emotions as a confabulated reason for overeating
Appetite, 2016
Emotional eating (i.e., overeating in response to negative affect) is a commonly accepted explanation for eating behaviors that are not in line with personal eating-norms. However, the empirical evidence for a causal link between self-reported emotional eating and overeating is mixed. The present study tested an alternative hypothesis stating that high emotional eating scores are indicative of a susceptibility to use negative affect as a confabulated, post-hoc reason to explain overeating. Female students (N = 46) participated in a 'taste-test' and came back to the lab a day later to receive feedback that they either ate too much (norm-violation condition) or an acceptable amount of food (control condition), whereafter emotional eating was assessed. Negative affect was measured several times throughout the study. In the norm-violation condition, participants with high emotional eating scores retrospectively rated their affect prior to eating as more negative than participant...