The Effect of Emotion Differentiation and Emotional State on Eating

Emotion differentiation, a component of emotional awareness, is the ability to identify and label emotional experiences into discrete categories. The present study examines the influence of emotion differentiation and emotional state, specifically sad versus positive mood, on eating in a laboratory setting. Undergraduate student participants completed a series of questionnaires, including a measure of emotion differentiation, and then underwent a randomly assigned sad or positive mood induction. Afterwards, they participated in a taste test. Food was counted before and after the taste test to determine total caloric intake. Results showed that negative emotion differentiation was significantly associated with overall caloric intake, such that low negative emotion differentiators ate more regardless of mood induction group. Positive emotion differentiation was not associated with caloric intake. A mediation analysis found that difficulties regulating emotions predicted less negative emotion differentiation, which in turn predicted increased caloric intake. The same pattern of results was found for the mediating effect of negative emotion differentiation on the relation between depressive symptoms and caloric intake.