Exploring Emotional-Eating Patterns in Different Cultures: Toward a Conceptual Framework Model

Abstract

ABSTRACT There exists a lack of understanding in food-consumption research concerning how people in different cultures regulate their emotional experiences through different forms of eating patterns. This paper integrates conceptual preunderstanding with the insights from empirical exploration to offer a tentative framework model that can be used in analyzing emotional eating in different cultures. The emotions of happiness, gratitude, irritation, and shame and their self-regulation through different emotional eating activities were compared across Finnish, French, and Pakistani cultures. There were strong differences among the three samples: Finnish students react to positive emotions with solitary eating patterns, and to negative emotions by social and luxurious eating patterns. On the contrary, French students associate social and luxurious eating patterns with positive emotions, and in the case of negative emotions, reject both social and luxurious eating activities. Pakistani students associate a social and everyday eating activity to both positive and negative emotions. Despite the cultural differences discovered, understanding these differences in terms of differences in cultural values is challenging. These challenges are discussed when a framework for analyzing emotional eating in different cultures is developed in the concluding section of the article.