People with overweight and obesity are susceptible to emotional eating, which is defined as the urge to eat in response to negative and positive emotional antecedents [1-3]. Emotional eating is associated with poor physiological and psychological outcomes, including disordered eating [4-5]. Some research suggests that negative emotional eating prospectively predicts disordered eating [6], making it an important treatment target in prevention research.
One theoretical model underlying emotional eating is maladaptive affect regulation. Maladaptive affect regulation includes difficulty regulating emotions, traditionally negative emotions, and encompasses a range of difficulties around labeling, clarity, avoidance, and suppression of negative emotions [7-8]. To date, maladaptive affect regulation has been used to explain emotional eating [1, 9], with overall findings suggesting that difficulty regulating negative emotions is positively associated with these maladaptive eating behaviors. In addition to negative emotional eating, poor emotion regulation may be associated with positive emotional eating. For example, a recent study showed an interaction between parental feeding and emotion regulation difficulties in their relationship with positive emotional eating [10]. While future research is needed, maladaptive affect regulation may be a useful framework to explain emotional eating, including both negative and positive emotional eating. Indeed, this shared mechanism of maladaptive affect regulation reveals an important opportunity for research to explore therapeutic targets that may yield benefits across. One such therapeutic target is mindfulness.
Broadly, mindfulness includes a range of attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors that guide attention to the present moment [11]. More specifically, mindfulness includes attitudes of acceptance about one’s experiences in real-time, both positive and negative, as well as general beliefs of openness to experiences [12]. Mindfulness also includes behaviors marked by navigating one’s environment with awareness, again to the present moment [12, 13]. Research suggests that mindfulness processes exert their therapeutic effects by improving maladaptive affect regulation (e.g., correlational data [14]; experimental data [15]; review [16]); thus, mindfulness processes may exert therapeutic effects on emotional eating by improving maladaptive affect regulation. In the context of treatment research, mindfulness-based interventions have been demonstrated to reduce the severity of a range of maladaptive eating phenotypes [17-20] and improve health status (e.g., weight loss [21]) among adults with overweight/obesity. Mindfulness has been conceptualized broadly and as specific facets, including acting with awareness, describe, non-judgment, non-reactive, and observe mindfulness [22]. Briefly, acting with awareness mindfulness includes focused attention to the present moment, including one’s thoughts and emotions, driving goal-oriented behavior; describe mindfulness includes labeling experiences with language; non-reactive mindfulness includes letting thoughts and emotions be experienced without attentional engagement; non-judgment mindfulness includes acceptance and openness toward one’s internal state; and observe mindfulness includes the active recognition of one’s external/sensory experiences [22]. Examining specific facets may provide detailed information about mindfulness’s therapeutic value across the spectrum of eating pathology.
To date, some research has explored mindfulness facets in relation emotional eating. One recent meta-analysis [23] identified that emotional eating was strongly and inversely associated with mindfulness; however, this construct of emotional eating included external eating. Thus, the nature of relations between mindfulness facets and emotional eating, specifically negative and positive emotional eating and emotional eating types (e.g., eating in response to depression), is less clear. Importantly, this same meta-analysis identified that external/emotional eating, as opposed to general disordered eating, eating concern, bulimic behavior, and dietary restraint, was more strongly associated with mindfulness which speaks to the importance of further investigating the relationship between these variables [23]. One study identified that higher acting with awareness, describe, non-judgment, and non-reactive, but not observe, mindfulness facets were associated with lower negative emotional eating in a pre-surgical bariatric population [24]. In an online community sample with overweight weight status, higher acting with awareness, describe, and non-judgment, but not non-reactive and observe, mindfulness facets were associated with lower negative emotional eating [25]. Interestingly, other research has suggested that more external/sensory-based facets of mindfulness such as observe may be positively associated with negative emotional eating [25, 26-27]. Consistent with that theory, using a longitudinal approach, one study identified that higher observe mindfulness assessed at baseline was predictive of worsened external eating and negative emotional eating six months later [27]. Taken together, findings with diverse populations suggest that at the facet level, acting with awareness, non-judgment, describe, and non-reactive mindfulness appear to be consistently related to lower emotional eating. Furthermore, findings with observe mindfulness are mixed in relation to eating, suggesting the need for continued research. Importantly, no research has probed relations between mindfulness facets and specific types of self-reported negative emotional eating, such as eating in response to depression, anger/anxiety, and boredom, as well as its counterpart, positive emotional eating, in adults with overweight/obesity.
Examining associations between specific types of self-reported negative emotional eating and mindfulness facets is important given research suggests that negative emotional eating is a heterogenous construct [1, 28-29]. In other words, some negative emotional eating types (e.g., eating in response to depression) may be more strongly associated with psychopathology (e.g., disordered eating, emotion dysregulation) than other types of negative emotional eating (e.g., eating in response to boredom) [30]. It therefore can be argued that negative emotional eating types, as opposed to negative emotional eating more broadly, may present unique relationship with adaptive psychological processes like mindfulness, research that may provide a finer level of detail relevant to clinicians and researchers alike. Furthermore, no research to date has directly examined relationships between positive emotional eating and mindfulness facets, a concerning gap in the literature considering that negative and positive emotional eating types may occur at similar rates [31], that positive emotional eating is a common trigger for eating [32], and that positive emotional eating may be associated with negative psychological correlates (e.g., binge eating behavior; [33-34]). As such, research examining relationships between mindfulness facets positive emotional eating is needed to elucidate potential protective factors of this type of emotional eating.
The Present Study
Guided by shared theoretical mechanisms (e.g., maladaptive affect regulation [1, 9]), we explored relations between mindfulness facets and emotional eating in adults with overweight/obesity. More specifically, we explored relations between acting with awareness, describe, non-reactive, non-judgment, and observe mindfulness facets and negative (including eating in response to anger/anxiety, boredom, and depression) and positive emotional eating. Guided by previous research [23], exploratory hypotheses predicted that overall, negative relations would emerge between mindfulness facets and emotional eating in adults with overweight/obesity, but specific relations between mindfulness facets and emotional eating were examined as exploratory in nature. The present study first examined relationships between mindfulness facets and types of emotional eating (e.g., eating in response to depression, anger/anxiety, boredom, and positive emotional eating). Then, we examined which mindfulness facets were uniquely associated with emotional eating (e.g., eating in response to depression, anger/anxiety, boredom, and positive emotional eating) in a treatment-seeking sample of adults with overweight/obesity.