Background: Emotional 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.
Method: The 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.
Results: The 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.
Conclusion: The 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.
Keywords: Attentional bias; Emotional eating; Flanker task; Inhibitory control; Interference control; Mood induction.
Emotional eating is characterized by overeating following the experience of negative emotions. Emotional eating may cause significant psychological distress and health problems. Thus, it is important to better understand its underlying mechanisms. The study assessed how negative mood influences the ability to ignore the presence of high-calorie food images among females who are high or low on an emotional eating scale. Participants’ mood was manipulated by an autobiographic writing task (half of the participants described negative events and the other half emotionally neutral events). Then, they completed a computer task in which they were required to indicate whether a centrally presented image was of food or a non-food item as fast as possible. Next to the central image, there were additional images that were used for distraction. These images were also images of food or non-food items. Participants in the low emotional eating group showed greater distraction when food items were used for distraction. In contrast, those in the high emotional eating group were not distracted by food items. In fact, 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.
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