The Influence Of Emotion And Psychological Flexibility On College Students' Eating Behavior

The purposes of this study are to analyze the characteristics of psychological flexibility in College Students,and explore the Influence of emotions and psychological flexibility on eating behavior through questionnaires and experiments.Two studies were conducted:Study 1:To analyze the situation of the College Students' psychological flexibility.In total,we recruit 475 college students,and let them complete AAQ-II(Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-2nd Edition)to measure the level of psychological flexibility of the subjects and collect demographic variable information.The result shows that the psychological flexibility of college students is at a general level.The psychological flexibility values between different demographic variable(such as genders and majors)were compared with independent t-test.The results show that there are significant differences within genders and majors in psychological flexibility,which male students are significantly more flexible than female students,liberal arts students are significantly less flexible than science students,while between other demographic variables are not obvious differences.Study 2:To explore the effects of emotion and psychological flexibility on College Students' eating behavior.The subjects in Study 1 were arranged from high to low in terms of psychological flexibility.The top 27% were the group with high-psychological flexibility and the last 27% were the group with low-psychological flexibility.Finally,33 subjects in the group with high psychological flexibility and 32 subjects in the group with low psychological flexibility were selected.The experiment was carried out in a behavioral laboratory where environmental variables(such as light condition and noise)were well controlled.In the experiment,subjects were induced to experience positive,neutral and negative emotion by watching comedies,documentaries and tragic movies for the same length of time.The popcorn consumption during different types of movies were taken as the index of eating behavior,and the popcorn consumption under neutral emotion was taken as the baseline level.Calculate the changes and the degree of change of popcorn consumption in positive and negative emotion,respectively.The average change degree of eating behavior under the two emotions was taken as the index of eating behavior stability.The collecting dates were analyzed by repeated measurement analysis of variance,simple effect analysis and hierarchical regression model.The results showes that: In positive and negative emotions,the eating behavior was significantly higher than that of neutral emotion;in high-psychological flexibility group,the eating behavior was significantly higher than that of positive and neutral emotion,and there was no significant difference between positive and neutral emotion.For lowpsychological flexibility group,there was significant difference between any of the three emotional states,the eating behavior of this group with negative emotion was the highest,and with neutral emotion was the lowest;the eating behavior and its change degree of the group with high-psychological flexibility were significantly lower than those of the group with lowpsychological flexibility,and the average change degree of eating behavior of the group with high-psychological flexibility was also significantly lower than that of the group with low-psychological flexibility;the psychological flexibility could explain 26.9% of the stability of dietary behavior.The variation reached a significant level.Conclusion:(1)The psychological flexibility of College students is at the general level,and there are significant differences between different genders and different majors,which shows that male students' psychological flexibility is significantly higher than female students' and the individual of science students' psychological flexibility is significantly higher than that of liberal arts majors.(2)Both positive and negative emotions can significantly increase the eating behavior;the changes of eating behavior and eating behavior in high-psychological flexibility group are lower than those in low psychological flexibility group,and their eating behavior is more stable;the level of psychological flexibility can significantly predict the stability of eating behavior.