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Development and preliminary validation of the Salzburg Emotional Eating Scale
The currently used self-report questionnaires to assess emotional eating do not account for the distinction between the experience of emotions and the resulting increase or decrease in food consumption. Meule et al. (2018) responded to this gap by developing a novel measurement scale for emotional eating, the Salzburg Emotional Eating Scale (SEES), where the higher end of the scale alludes to emotional overeating and the lower end to emotional undereating. Through their first study, the authors used a group of 40 emotional states, with the subsequent factor analysis identifying four SEES subscales: happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety. Thereafter, the scale was curtailed to a total of 20 emotional states (five per subscale) and was further tested in two subsequent studies. SEES demonstrated a robust consistency in all three studies, showing through mean subscale scores that the highest tendencies to emotional overeating are associated with sadness and anger, and a substantial association was seen between emotional undereating and anxiety. Furthermore, the higher a participant scored on the happiness scale, the lower were their negative emotional scores, body mass index (BMI), and dietary derangements, while higher negative emotional scores were found to be associated with lower happiness subscale scores, higher BMI and increased dietary derangements. The authors comment that SEES provides a consistent option to examine emotional eating, improving on the specificity (by accounting for distinct emotional states) and span (by accounting for both over- and under-eating) of current investigative measures of the links between emotions and eating. [NPID: Emotional eating, positive emotions, negative emotions, arousal, eating behavior, BMI]
Year: 2018
