Abstract
BackgroundEmotional eating refers to overeating triggered by emotional experiences and may cause significant psychological distress and health problems. Thus, it is important to better understand its underlying mechanisms. The study examined if the ability to ignore task-irrelevant information, namely, interference control, is modulated by mood and exposure to food stimuli among females who are high and low on emotional eating.MethodThe study’s sample included 80 women who were high (N = 40) or low (N = 40) on an emotional eating scale. Participants were divided to a negative or neutral mood induction group. Following the mood induction, they completed a food-flanker task that allowed assessing attentional interference caused by food and non-food stimuli separately.ResultsThe low emotional eating group had significantly greater food compared to non-food interference, suggesting difficulty at ignoring food stimuli while attending a neutral target. In the high emotional eating group, there was no difference between food and non-food interference. However, higher levels of emotional eating predicted lower levels of food interference.ConclusionThe pattern of results suggests a food-avoidance attentional tendency among those with higher levels of emotional eating. The mood manipulation did not influence food-related interference in either group. The lack of an effect of mood on food-related interference questions the impact of negative emotions on basic attentional processes among individuals with emotional eating.
Highlights
Emotional eating refers to overeating triggered by emotional experiences and may cause significant psychological distress and health problems
Higher levels of emotional eating were associated with diversion of attention away from food stimuli, irrespective of mood. We suggest that these results reflect a broader avoidant strategy that is activated in response to emotionally negative content among individuals with emotional eating
Our findings demonstrated that participants in the low Emotional eating (EE) group had greater difficulty focusing on a central target when task-irrelevant food images were presented in close proximity to the target, compared to when non-food images were used as irrelevant distractors
Summary
Emotional eating refers to overeating triggered by emotional experiences and may cause significant psychological distress and health problems. Ecological momentary assessment studies have reported that high self-report EE scores were associated with higher levels of negative affect and lower levels of positive affect before eating occurred in the natural environment [10]. In light of these inconsistencies, it may be useful to assess whether, at the basic attentional level, food stimuli, and palatable high-calorie foods, are processed differently in response to negative emotions among individuals who identify themselves as high on EE
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