Taming “hanger” and falling prey to boredom-emotional and stress-eating in 801 healthy individuals using ecological momentary assessment

Abstract

Emotional eating and Stress Eating concepts hold that affective experiences can instill the desire for palatable foods. The empirical evidence for such couplings between affective and appetitive systems, however, is mixed and it remains unclear which one precedes the other or whether interindividual differences in such relationships exist. To study the temporal relations between a range of negative and positive emotions and stress on the one hand and snacking behavior on the other, we analyzed over 40.000 questionnaire entries obtained through ecological momentary assessment from 801 participants across nine different studies. Several trait-level eating style questionnaire scores were modelled as moderators for the emotion/stress - snacking relationships. Results showed that stronger boredom was followed by more snacking. Only irritation showed the pattern of reduction following snacking that would be predicted by emotion regulation accounts of emotional eating. Restrained eaters showed larger increases in boredom after snacking (compared to not snacking) than unrestrained eaters. Eating style questionnaires did not significantly moderate any other emotion – snacking – emotion relationships. Together with other recent findings from this dataset (Aulbach et al., n.d.) the present results suggest that eating style questionnaires capture tendencies to experience food cravings, but not snacking, as the latter might be ‘gated’ by several internal and external conditions that our EMA data and the trait questionnaire do not capture well. Accordingly, we suggest a novel terminology for affect-eating relationships that increases precision on the temporal (affects before or after eating/craving) and the phenomenological (snacking, craving) level.