The role of emotions in food consumption choice: Systematic review and directions for future studies

Abstract

Marketing researchers have extensively studied the causal influence of emotional state on food consumption. The present study offers a comprehensive systematic review of 111 articles related to the effect of emotions on unhealthy consumption over the past three decades—from 1993 to 2023. Applying the bibliometric coupling method identifies four main research themes in the marketing discipline: emotional eating: food as a coping mechanism, emotional eating: food as a reward, emotional eating: emotion as a multidimensional structure, and emotional eating: moderating effects of food sensory cues. Theoretical richness within each cluster is presented. In addition, the findings indicate that the marketing discipline has mainly relied on the proximate reasoning approach—explaining the causation and development of consumers' behavior—to describe the association between emotional state and food consumption choices. To broaden the scope of each research theme, we adopt the ultimate approach—explaining why a behavior exists—and focus on why unhealthy food consumption becomes a pattern of behavior. This study concludes by discussing the findings and offering several avenues for future research.