The Effect Of Boredom On Emotional Eating

Boring is common in our daily life through the emotional experience,to human behavior choice a non-ignorable effect,increasingly rich food types in meet diversified choice of the individual at the same time,also increased the individual risk of obesity and eating disorders,poor eating behaviors and even affect the individual’s physical and mental health.Emotional eating is considered as an individual’s eating response to negative emotions.Boredom is one of the important influencing factors of emotional eating.According to the meaning maintenance model,the maintenance of meaning is the most basic social motivation of human beings.When the meaning system is threatened,it will stimulate the motivation of the individual to maintain meaning,which will make the individual change the existing behavior pattern and compensate for the missing sense of meaning.Based on this theory,this study proposes that boredom can lead to emotional eating behavior,and attempts to explore the underlying intervention mechanism from the perspective of meaning,in order to reduce the negative impact of boredom on eating behavior.Study 1 included a questionnaire and a laboratory experiment.The relationship among boredom,emotional eating and weight gain was firstly investigated by questionnaire.Then,the influence of boredom on emotional eating was explored by laboratory method,which was reflected in the influence of food intake and food choice.In study 2,2(high/low boredom level)×2(meaningful reminder: experimental group/neutral group)experimental design was used to further verify the relationship between several variables in the experimental situation,and explore the impact of boredom on emotional eating under the context of meaningful reminder.The results showed that :(1)There was a significant positive correlation among boredom,emotional eating and weight gain;(2)The subjects in the high boredom condition ate more than those in the low boredom condition;(3)Boredom increases the consumption of unhealthy and attractive foods;(4)The main effect of boredom was significant,while the main effect of sense of meaning was not significant.The interaction between boredom and sense of meaning was significant,which indicated that sense of meaning played a moderating role in the relationship between boredom and emotional eating,and could reduce the emotional eating behavior caused by boredom.This study explored the influence of boredom on emotional eating through different methods,explored the role of meaning in it,and preliminarily verified the meaning regulation hypothesis of boredom.The results of this study expand the theoretical understanding of boredom and provide a basis for reducing the emotional eating behavior caused by boredom in daily life.