The Attentional Bias For Food Among Emotional Eaters In Emotional States-the Evidences From Eye Movement Studies

As we know, eating disorders will seriously endanger the health of people. As a reason, eating disorders get more and more attention in recent years. And many Studies have shown that if an individual have an emotional eating in a long term,it will increase his risk of suffering from eating disorders. Therefore, to identify emotional eating is very important. Emotional eating could be as an index of individual abnormal eating behaviors. Then, we could take measures to stop them from developing into more seriously eating disorders. In this study, the definition of emotional eating is from Bruch(1973), he believes that emotional eating is based on an emotional state instead of an individual internal signals(the felling of hunger or satiety).And this paper uses the emotional eating scale revised by Zhu Hong(2012) in the Chinese context to select emotional eaters in college students.This study include three parts, and the first part aims to select emotional eaters in a positive emotional state(positive emotional eating group) and to select emotional eaters in a negative emotional state(negative emotional eating group) through the emotional eating scale revised by Zhu Hong. Finally, we recruited 37 persons in the positive emotional eating group and 32 persons in the negative emotional eating group.The second part of this research, through an eye tracker, aims to investigate the attentional bias between food pictures and neutral pictures of emotional eaters. The2(subjects type: positive emotional eating group, negative emotional eating group)×2(emotional states: being happy, being sad)×2(pictures type: food pictures,neutral pictures) mixed design, with the subjects type and the emotional states are between-subject variables, the pictures type are within-subject variables. And with reference to previous studies, we choose first fixation duration, fixation time and fixation count as indices of attention. The ANOVA shows that in a happy emotional state, positive emotional eating group have an attention bias for food pictures, and in asad emotional state, negative emotional eating group have an attention bias for high-calorie food pictures.The third part of this research aims to investigate the attentional bias between high-calorie food pictures and low-calorie food pictures of emotional eaters. The2(subjects type: positive emotional eating group, negative emotional eating group)×2(emotional states: being happy, being sad) between-subject design. And with reference to previous studies, we choose first fixation duration, fixation time and fixation count as indices of attention. The ANOVA shows that in a happy emotional state, positive emotional eating group don’t have an attentional bias between high-calorie food pictures and low-calorie food pictures. In other words, positive emotional eating group may have an attentional bias for food, but neither for high-calorie food nor low-calorie food in a happy emotional state. However, in a sad emotional state, negative emotional eating group have an attentional bias for high-calorie food pictures.