Ahlich Erica, Goldstein Stephanie P, Thomas J Graham
Department of Psychology, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center, The Miriam Hospital/Brown Alpert Medical School, Providence, RI, USA.
Appetite. 2023 Apr 1;183:106476. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2023.106476. Epub 2023 Jan 28.
Emotional eating is a topic of clinical importance, with links to weight regulation and wellness. However, issues of concept clarity and measurement can interfere with efforts to understand and intervene on emotional eating. One explanation for prior difficulties in defining emotional eating may be that this construct is not uniform across individuals. The current study critically examined emotional eating by combining ecological momentary assessment (EMA) with an idiographic analytic approach. The study examined the heterogeneity in the emotions and dysregulated eating behaviors often thought to underlie emotional eating, by establishing and comparing latent factor profiles across individuals. Ten community adults with overweight or obesity completed a 21-day EMA protocol, with 5 daily prompts to report on relevant emotions and eating behaviors. P-technique factor analysis was used to examine the data. Results suggested variability across individuals in the number of factors that emerged, the items that loaded on each factor, and the strength of loadings. Dysregulated eating was not found to covary with affective states strongly enough to produce a distinct "emotional eating" factor for any individual, nor did the correlations between factors suggest strong relationships between emotions and dysregulated eating for most participants, even in this sample with 90% of participants self-identifying as "emotional eaters." Findings are consistent with a growing body of literature questioning the validity of the "emotional eating" construct as currently defined and measured, and supports conceptualizing emotional eating as a locally heterogenous construct that varies between people. Combining EMA with an intra-individual modeling technique appears to be a promising approach for understanding emotional eating. Additional work with larger samples is needed to capture the full range in individual profiles.
情绪化进食是一个具有临床重要性的话题，与体重调节和健康状况相关。然而，概念清晰度和测量问题可能会干扰对情绪化进食的理解和干预。先前在定义情绪化进食方面存在困难的一个解释可能是，这种概念在个体之间并不统一。本研究通过将生态瞬时评估（EMA）与个性化分析方法相结合，对情绪化进食进行了批判性考察。该研究通过建立和比较个体间的潜在因素概况，研究了通常被认为是情绪化进食基础的情绪和失调饮食行为的异质性。10名超重或肥胖的社区成年人完成了一项为期21天的EMA方案，每天有5次提示，要求报告相关情绪和饮食行为。采用P技术因素分析来检验数据。结果表明，个体在出现的因素数量、每个因素上加载的项目以及加载强度方面存在差异。对于任何个体，失调饮食与情感状态之间的共变关系都不够强，无法产生一个独特的“情绪化进食”因素，而且即使在90%的参与者自我认定为“情绪化进食者”的这个样本中，大多数参与者的因素之间的相关性也没有表明情绪与失调饮食之间存在强烈关系。研究结果与越来越多的文献一致，这些文献质疑当前定义和测量的“情绪化进食”概念的有效性，并支持将情绪化进食概念化为个体间存在差异的局部异质性概念。将EMA与个体内建模技术相结合似乎是理解情绪化进食的一种有前景的方法。需要对更大的样本进行更多研究，以全面了解个体概况。
