The Revision Of The Emotional Eating Scale And The Applied Research

Objective (1) to revise the Emotional Eating Scale;(2) to compare the difference of different eaters in eating disorder, mental health and self-control;(3) to test the mediation effects of self-control between emotional eating and eating disorder.Methods In study1, a sample of543Chinese university students completed measures of the Emotional Eating Scale-Revision (EES-R), Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), The Symptom Checklist-90(SCL-90), The Eating Disorder Inventory-1(EDI), The Eating Attitude Test (EAT), The Self-Control Scale (SCS). Pearson correlation, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and one-way ANOVA were used to explore the construct and examine the difference of different eaters in eating disorder, mental health and self-control. In study2, a sample of428Chinese university students were used to test the mediation effects of self-control between emotional eating and eating disorder.Results The results demonstrated high internal consistency and adequate test-retest reliability, and validity. The Cronbach’s a was0.894, test-retest reliability was from0.721to0.770. In addition, positive emotion subscale was added to EES. Both negative and positive emotional eaters were significantly influenced by emotion. Results indicated that negative emotional eaters were significantly higher than positive emotional eaters and normal eaters on all eating disorder symptoms and the psychological symptoms(P<0.05), however, there is no significant difference between negative emotional eaters and positive emotional eaters in self-control. At last, structural equation modeling indicated that self-control partially mediated the association between emotional eating and eating disorder.Conclusions (1) The EES-R demonstrated good reliability and validity.(2) Significant differences of different eaters were demonstrated in both positive and negative psychology indicators. Positive emotion plays an important role in eating behavior as well as negative emotion. But the negative emotional eater tended to increase the risk of eating disorder and other psychology problems.(3) Self-control partially mediated the association between negative emotional eating and eating disorder.