Characterizing emotional eating: Ecological momentary assessment with person-specific modeling

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.