Description
TitleThe emotional and cognitive functions of comfort eating
Date Created2015
Other Date2015-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (vi, 69 p. : ill.)
Description“Comfort eating” involves consuming highly palatable food in an effort to decrease negative emotion (Gibson, 2012). Despite existing empirical work demonstrating that comfort eating reduces negative emotion (Macht, 2008), recent research challenges these findings (Wagner et al., 2014) and raises questions about the functions of this behavior. To refine our understanding of comfort eating, the current study examined the functional impact of palatable food consumption on negative and positive emotion following stress, compared these effects to those produced by alternative coping behaviors, and examined the functional role of rumination. A community sample of 119 healthy men and women aged 18-31 years old underwent a 15-minute stress induction (Trier Social Stress Test; Kirschbaum et al., 1993), then engaged in 1 of 3 emotion regulation tasks: eating comfort food (M&Ms), using a stress relief ball, or sitting quietly. State emotion and rumination were assessed before stress, after stress, and after the randomized task. Repeated-measures MANCOVA analyses revealed that, while comfort eating significantly reduced negative emotion as expected, it was no more effective than doing nothing or using an alternative emotion regulation strategy. More promisingly, findings examining positive emotion demonstrated potential positive reinforcement functions of comfort eating. While both participants who used a stress ball and those who sat quietly experienced significant declines in positive emotion throughout the experiment, comfort eaters displayed steady levels of positive emotion. Findings also shed light on the role of rumination in comfort eating, as all emotion regulation tasks in this experiment were more negatively reinforcing and less positively reinforcing for high versus low state ruminators. Collectively, these findings suggest that comfort eating may be complexly reinforced through multiple pathways, including both positive reinforcement and, particularly among high state ruminators, negative reinforcement. Given this, future research on comfort eating should examine the roles of positive emotion and rumination in understanding and treating comfort eating.
NoteM.S.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Emily Panza
Genretheses, ETD graduate
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
Statistical Profile