Negative emodiversity is associated with emotional eating in adolescents: An examination of emotion dynamics in daily life

Abstract

Introduction: Emotional eating is a mental health concern, common in adolescents, that develops as a result of their tendency to use high-energy food to regulate their fluctuating emotions. Due to their highly fluctuating emotional life, adolescents tend to have unique within-person profiles of emotional experiences that change across moments and days, often lost in global assessments of emotions. Hence, it is imperative to examine individual differences in dynamics of emotions, as experienced in daily life, in relation to emotional eating in adolescents. Methods: In an Ecological Momentary Assessment study, we examined individual differences in three within-person dynamic characteristics (baseline levels, intraindividual variability, and emodiversity) of emotions in 158 dominantly Hispanic adolescents in the United States, aged 14–17 years old, predicting trait-level emotional eating. Results: Results indicated that higher negative emodiversity, baselines, and variability in stress were predictive of emotional eating in adolescents. When all considered together, negative emodiversity (i.e., variety of the types of negative emotions experienced in one's daily life) remained the only significant predictor of emotional eating. Conclusions: This study affirms the importance of diversity in emotional experiences in relation to emotional eating, particularly in daily contexts of adolescents' lives. Additionally, the study emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between diversity (i.e., variety in types) in positive versus negative emotional experiences with regard to emotional eating. By taking into account the ecological validity of adolescents' daily lives and individual differences in dynamical changes in emotions, we are taking a step forward by shedding light on how the dynamics of negative emotions—in terms of within-person baselines, variability, and diversity—might be related to general levels of emotional eating in adolescents.