Abstract
Existing self-report questionnaires for the assessment of emotional eating do not differentiate between specific types of emotions and between increased or decreased food intake in response to these emotions. Therefore, we developed a new measure of emotional eating—the Salzburg Emotional Eating Scale (SEES)—for which higher scores indicate eating more than usual in response to emotions and lower scores indicate eating less than usual in response to emotions. In study 1, a pool of items describing 40 emotional states was used. Factor analysis yielded four factors, which represented both positive (happiness subscale) and negative emotions (sadness, anger, and anxiety subscales). Subsequently, the scale was reduced to 20 items (5 items for each subscale) and its four-factor structure was replicated in studies 2 and 3. In all three studies, internal consistencies of each subscale were α > 0.70 and mean subscale scores significantly differed from each other such that individuals reported the strongest tendency to eat more than usual when being sad and the strongest tendency to eat less than usual when being anxious (sadness > happiness > anger > anxiety). Higher scores on the happiness subscale related to lower scores on the negative emotions subscales, lower body mass index (BMI), and lower eating pathology. In contrast, higher scores on the negative emotions subscales related to lower scores on the happiness subscale, higher BMI, and higher eating pathology. The SEES represents a useful measure for the investigation of emotional eating by increasing both specificity (differentiation between specific emotional states) and breadth (differentiation between increase and decrease of food intake) in the assessment of the emotion–eating relationship.
Highlights
Emotional eating is often defined as an increase in food intake in order to cope with negative emotions (Macht and Simons, 2011)
While most research has focused on increased food intake, it has been found that experiencing emotions can result in a decrease in food intake, depending on self-reported emotional eating tendencies
In order to reduce the number of items for the Salzburg Emotional Eating Scale (SEES), five items with the highest factor loadings were selected for further analyses (Table 1)
Summary
Emotional eating is often defined as an increase in food intake in order to cope with negative emotions (Macht and Simons, 2011). Food intake is often used as an emotion regulation strategy, it usually does not reduce negative affect effectively and, the mechanisms that generate and maintain emotional eating are far from being clear (Haedt-Matt et al, 2014). A recent review of the literature on self-report measures of emotional eating criticized their lack of predictive validity, pointing to the weak and inconsistent associations with actual food intake in laboratory-based and naturalistic studies (Bongers and Jansen, 2016). One reason for this might be that they only cover a restricted range of relevant aspects of emotional eating. Most measures solely include negative emotions and only ask about eating more in response to these emotions, leaving out the possibility of reduced food intake (Bongers and Jansen, 2016)
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