Revisiting ‘emotional eating’: Retrospective overestimation of negative affect as a post-hoc justification for overeating

Emotional eating (overeating in response to negative affect) is a commonly accepted explanation for eating behaviors that are not in line with personal eating-norms. However, the empirical evidence for a causal link between self-reported emotional eating status and overeating is mixed. The present study tested the hypothesis that higher scores on emotional eating represent a susceptibility to use negative affect as a confabulated, post-hoc reason to explain overeating. Therefore, female students (N = 46)participated in a ‘taste-test’ and came back to the lab a day later to receive feedback that they either ate too much (norm-violation condition) or an acceptable amount of food (control condition), whereafter emotional eating was assessed. In addition, negative affect was measured several times throughout the study. An interaction was found: In the norm-violation condition, participants who scored high on emotional eating retrospectively rated their affect prior to eating as more negative than participants in the control condition. In the control condition, no effect of emotional score on affect ratings was found. Hence, it is likely that for some individuals emotional eating scores represent a tendency to retrospectively attribute overeating to negative affect rather than an actual tendency to eat in response to negative affect.