Emotional awareness and emotional eating

Two studies examined the relation between emotional awareness (attention to and clarity of emotions) and eating behaviours. In Study 1, college women (n = 198) completed measures of emotional awareness, emotional eating, and neuroticism. When all predictors were considered simultaneously, low attention to emotion was the only significant predictor of emotional eating. In Study 2, to test whether low attention to emotion would lead to increased eating in a laboratory setting, social anxiety was induced, and attention to emotion was manipulated experimentally in a sample of college women (n = 100). Women who reported low levels of trait attention to emotion who were also in the low attention to emotion condition had the greatest caloric consumption.