The Impact Of Different Types Of Boring On Eating Behavior

Food is closely related to daily life, but the reason why people eat is diverse.Nowadays, we have more access to food, and emotion is playing an increasingly vital role in eating behaviors. Frequent emotional eating will lead to obesity issues as well as eating disorders, which makes it a risk factor for physical and mental health. As a common emotion in life, boredom is also one of the primary negative emotions resulting in emotional eating. Hence, studying the effect of boredom on eating will not only enrich the theory of emotional eating, but also provide reference for prevention and intervention of certain health problems. This paper includes two studies, and aims to research the effect of boredom on eating by classifying types of boredom and food.Study 1 consists of a pilot study and a behavioral experiment, it explores the effect of trait boredom and state boredom on food intake. The pilot study established materials inducing state boredom. Experiment 1 screened subjects with high or low trait boredom via Boredom Proneness Scale, and assigned them to situations that are extreme boring or a little bit boring. By measuring how much subjects eat, we find that trait boredom does not affect food intake. However, state boredom increases food intake significantly, which is mainly resulted from the increase of subjects with low trait boredom in high state boredom situation.Study 2 consists of a pilot study and a behavioral experiment as well, it explores the effect of trait boredom and state boredom on food choice. The pilot study chose four types of food as representatives that is different in dimensions of sweetness,health, and attractiveness, namely chocolate beans, potato chips, noris, and raisins.Similar to Experiment 1, Experiment 2 weighed the amount of each food before and after subjects ate. The results indicate that subjects with low trait boredom ate significantly more chocolate beans and potato chips in extreme boring situation, while amount of noris and raisins did not change significantly in all subjects. It means that bored people tend to choose unhealthy food and attractive food.In conclusion, the major finding of this paper is that highly boring situation makes people who are not susceptible to boredom eat more unhealthy food as well as attractive food.