Implicit Association Between Food Cues And Negative Emotions In Adolescents: The Regulatory Role Of Emotional Eating

In recent years,the global obesity problem is becoming more and more serious.In the past 10 years,the obesity rate of children and adolescents aged 6-17 in China has doubled,reaching nearly 53 million.Obesity not only affects physical development,but also makes teenagers have inferiority complex,which has a serious impact on psychological development.The unhealthy eating habits of adolescents is an important reason for obesity,and among the many factors affecting eating,emotion is an aspect worthy of investigation.In the face of negative emotions,an individual’s behavior pattern of increasing eating is called emotional eating.For to understand the current situation of adolescents’ emotional eating,to explore the implicit association between negative emotions and food cues;to investigate whether adolescents with high emotional eating have stronger feelings for negative emotions and reward response to food,and whether this difference will regulate the connection between stress words and food,two groups of implicit association task(IAT)experiments were conducted.In Study 1,105 students(average age 13.25 ± 0.63 years)from Grade 7 to grade 9were selected,including 47 girls.The subjects were divided into high emotional eating group(45 people,emotional eating score was 41.62 ± 12.73)and low emotional eating group(60 people,score 18.32 ± 5.15).A mixed experimental design was adopted,in which the group(high emotional eating vs.low emotional eating)was taken as the inter subject variable,and the type of trial times(compatible;negative-food;vs.incompatible:negative-non food)was used as the internal variable.The subjects completed the basic information registration,self-report of attention and learning deficits,self rating Anxiety Scale(SAS),self rating Depression Scale(SDS),Chinese version of Dutch Eating Behavior Scale(debq),positive negative emotion scale(Panas),and scored0-100 on current hunger,satiety,thirst and fatigue,and then completed food emotion pictures Implicit Association Task(IAT).The correct rate and reaction time of thesubjects in compatible and incompatible trials were recorded.The analysis of reaction time showed that the reaction time of high emotional eating to compatible test was significantly longer than that of incompatible test.What is more interesting is that the response time of high emotional eating group to compatibility test was significantly shorter than that of low emotional eating group.Which indicates that when negative emotions are associated with food,adolescents with high emotional eating respond faster than those with low emotional eating;meanwhile,low emotional eating group is more sensitive to compatibility.The reaction time of the test times was longer than that of the incompatible tests.This result confirms our hypothesis that "the response time of adolescents in high emotional eating group is lower than that in low emotional eating group" in completing compatible tasks,which indicates that adolescents with high emotional eating have an implicit connection between food and negative emotions.The purpose of study 2 was to investigate the perception of negative emotions and the reward response to food in adolescents with high emotional eating,and whether this difference moderates the connection between stress words and food.A total of 101students(average age 13.27 ± 0.63 years)from Grade 7 to grade 9 were selected,including 46 girls.The subjects were divided into high emotional eating group(42people,emotional eating score was 41.71 ± 12.57)and low emotional eating group(59people,score 18.73 ± 5.26).In this study,a mixed experimental design was used with the group(high emotional eating vs.low emotional eating)as the inter subject variable and the type of trial times(compatible;stress-food;vs.incompatibility: relaxation-non food)as the internal variable.At first,the subjects scored the current hunger,satiety,thirst and fatigue from 0 to 100 to complete the Implicit Association Task(IAT)of food and stress words.Then,the valence and arousal degree of stress words,the liking degree and desire degree of object words were evaluated.Pearson correlation analysis was conducted between the scores of emotional eating and the liking and craving of food words,the valence and arousal of pressure words,and the behavior performance in the task of free implicit association.The results showed that emotional eating was positively correlated with food liking and craving and stress vocabulary arousal,which indicated that the higher the emotional eating,the higher the liking degree of food,the more you want to eat high calorie food,and the stronger the perceived stressintensity to the same stress event.Through the two IAT experiments above,this study found that: 1.Adolescents with emotional eating establish an implicit connection between negative emotions and food cues;2.Adolescents with high emotional eating experience more stress in the same stress events,and have higher liking and craving for the same food.This study provides a theoretical basis for the cause of emotional eating.In order to improve the emotional eating,we should cut off the implicit connection between food and negative emotion,adjust the cognition of stress and pay attention to emotional regulation.