Decomposing stress eating and emotional eating in daily life. Emotional stress eater or stressed emotional eater?

Eating behavior is driven by various non-homeostatic factors, most prominently stress and negative emotions. Stress/emotion related eating impacts public health systems not only because it is very common in the population but also because their extreme manifestations can take the form of uncontrolled binge eating as in eating disorders. Previous research suggests that stressors can either increase or decrease subsequent food intake. Reasons for this variability are unclear but it is likely that psychological stressor responses (i.e., feeling stressed) and physiological stressor responses interact in influencing eating behavior. Relatedly, negative emotions can increase subsequent eating which is traditionally attributed to psychological emotion-regulatory mechanisms: consumption of tasty foods can improve emotional state. Critically, though, there is a segregation of the stress-eating and emotional eating literature, slowing progress and precluding conceptual clarity. Thus, the proposed project aims at integrating these two literatures on the levels of terminology, measurement, theory and interventions.