Emotional eating: elusive or evident? Integrating laboratory, psychometric and daily life measures

PURPOSE: Emotional eating (EE) refers to eating in response to (negative) emotions. Evidence for the validity of EE is mixed: some meta-analyses find EE only in eating disordered patients, others only in restrained eaters, which suggest that only certain subgroups show EE. Furthermore, EE measures from lab-based assessments, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and psychometric measures often diverge. This paper tested whether the covariance of these three different EE methods can be modeled through a single latent variable (factorial validity), and if so, how this variable would relate to restrained eating (construct validity), Body-Mass-Index (BMI), and subclinical eating disorder symptomatology (concurrent validity). METHODS: 102 non-eating disordered female participants with a wide BMI range completed EE measures from three methods: psychometric questionnaires, a laboratory experiment (craving ratings of food images in induced neutral vs. negative emotion) and EMA questionnaires (within-participant correlations of momentary negative emotions and momentary food cravings across 9 days). Two measures for each method were extracted and submitted to confirmatory factor analysis. RESULTS: A one-factor model provided a good fit. The resulting EE(lat) factor correlated positively with subclinical eating disorder symptoms and BMI but not with restrained eating. CONCLUSIONS: The one-factor solution shows that the EE construct can validly be assessed with three different methods. Individual differences in EE are supported by the data and are related to eating and weight problem symptomatology but not to restrained eating. This supports learning accounts of EE and underscores the relevance of the EE construct to physical and mental health. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II (Evidence obtained from well-designed controlled trials without randomization). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40519-023-01606-8.