Abstract
Research investigating the role of maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) on food intake has exclusively focused on food intake in a forced consumption situation. In contrast, the present study examined the effect of negative emotions (fear, negative affect) and ER strategies (suppression, reappraisal) on food intake in a non-forced, free eating setting where participants (N = 165) could choose whether and how much they ate. This free (ad libitum) eating approach enabled, for the first time, the testing of (1) whether eating (yes/no) is used as a secondary ER strategy and (2) whether the amount of food intake differed, depending on the ER strategy. In order to produce a more ecologically valid design, ER strategy manipulation was realized while exposing participants to emotion induction procedures. To induce an initial negative emotional state, a movie clip was presented without ER instruction. The instructions to regulate emotions (suppression, reappraisal, no ER instruction) then preceded a second clip. The results show that whereas about two-thirds of the control (no ER instruction) and suppression groups began to eat, only one-third of the reappraisal group did. However, when reappraisers began to eat, they ate as much as participants in the suppression and control groups. Accordingly, the results suggest that when people are confronted with a negative event, eating is used as a secondary coping strategy when the enacted ER is ineffective. Conversely, an adaptive ER such as reappraisal decreases the likelihood of eating in the first place, even when ER is employed during rather than before the unfolding of the negative event. Consequently, the way we deal with negative emotions might be more relevant for explaining emotional eating than the distress itself.
Highlights
The relationship between negative emotions and eating has been extensively researched over the years
The manipulation was successful in inducing a heightened negative emotional state in all three conditions and a comparable negative emotional state was observed across the three emotion regulation (ER) instruction groups at T2, see Figure 1A
Research has recently turned to studying individual differences in ER as a predictor of emotional eating (Evers et al, 2010)
Summary
The relationship between negative emotions and eating has been extensively researched over the years. The results show that negative affect (NA) typically increases the amount of food intake within restrained eaters. Macht (2008) reviewed studies on changes in eating in response to emotional stress, including more than 4,700 subjects, and found huge variations in the proportion of participants who reported eating more (4–55%) or less (32–70%) as a response. The experiments included in this review, which examine the impact of negative emotions on eating within normal eaters, showed an increase in food consumption in 43% of the studies, whereas 39% found a decrease and 26% found no effect (Macht, 2008). A comparable inconsistency of the effect of negative emotions on food consumption has been observed within field studies using self-report. In order to reconsolidate the inconsistent findings, it has been suggested that NA does not uniformly elicit increased food intake but that the way people regulate NA is the key to the triggered eating response (Evers et al, 2010)
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