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Boredom proneness, interoception, and emotional eating
Emotional eating is linked to weight gain and makes it more challenging to lose weight when weight reduction strategies are used. According to theoretical and empirical research, boredom may play a significant role in developing problematic eating patterns. However, little research has looked at how boredom contributes to emotional eating. Additionally, individual variations in the capacity to detect internal cues (also known as interoception) may change how boredom affects emotional eating. In this study by Ahlich & Rancourt (2022), the authors investigated whether boredom proneness would predict unique variance in emotional eating after controlling for both positive and negative affect and if that association would be more robust in people with weaker interoceptive abilities than in people with stronger interoceptive abilities. MTurk was used to find participants ages 18 to 65 ((n = 365; 59.2% female), while an undergraduate research pool was used to recruit more participants (n = 461; 52.9% female). The Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire-Emotional Eating, the Boredom Proneness Scale, the Intuitive Eating Scale-2- Reliance on Hunger and Satiety Cues, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness-2, and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule were all completed by the participants. Even after controlling for the broad characteristics of negative and positive affect, the authors discovered that boredom propensity was a significant predictor of emotional eating in both populations. Interoception was an independent predictor of emotional eating but did not mitigate the link between boredom propensity and emotional eating in either sample. The authors discuss that interoceptive ability and boredom propensity may need to be targeted to prevent and manage emotional eating. Future research should continue investigating various emotion classifications and interoceptive aspects of emotional eating, as well as investigating novel processes that could guide therapeutic efforts. [NPID: Affect, boredom, emotional eating, interoception]
Year: 2022
