Emotional eating has been identified as an unhealthy behavior and risk factor for overweight status among children, adolescents and adults. Emotional eating - tendency to eat when not hungry to cope with stress or negative emotion - leads to overweight status through the increased consumption of high energy dense foods over time. Cross-cultural differences have been found in the prevalence of emotional eating, with Hispanics reporting higher frequencies of emotional eating than Caucasians. Very little is known about what predisposes children to emotionally eat, but the developmental literature can elucidate potential child characteristics that predispose children to emotionally eat. The proposed study explores the relationship between negative affectivity and effortful control (two constructs that have been found to predict children's psychosocial, behavioral and academic outcomes) to emotional eating and a child's weight status. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that children who exhibit high levels of negative affectivity and/or low levels of effortful control may be more likely to emotionally eat which could put them at risk future weight gain beyond what is developmentally appropriate. The sample will consist of 200 children between the ages of 4 to 6 years old, of which 100 will be Hispanic and 100 will be Caucasian. Children will be given a standard FDA approved snack before being asked to complete an Effortful Control Battery, followed by a mildly stressing task. Stress responses will be measured via respiration and heart rate. After the stress induction, children will partake in an eating laboratory task designed to measure emotional eating. While the children are completing the tasks their primary caregiver will complete several questionnaires related to the child's temperamental negative affectivity, effortful control, child eating behaviors, child physical activity levels, parental feeding strategies, and food-related household security. This research is innovative because it combined the developmental, emotional eating, and obesity literature to create a hypothesized model of emotional eating that can predispose children to become overweight. It goes beyond identifying risk factors for emotional eating and addresses why there are cross-cultural differences in emotional eating and prevalence of children overweight. In addition, it furthers the developmental literature by establishing measurement equivalence on measures of effortful control and temperamental negative affectivity and exploring cross-cultural differences on these measures. If our hypotheses are confirmed, empirically validated interventions for children exist to increase emotion regulation and inhibitory control which may be important interventions to include in obesity prevention programs. The cross-cultural differences that emerge may also inform adaptations to obesity prevention programs for Hispanic children.
This proposal is attempting to identify a specific group of children at risk for becoming overweight, or for those already overweight for becoming obese, through child temperamental factors. If our hypotheses are confirmed, empirically validated interventions for children exist to increase emotion regulation and inhibitory control which may be important interventions to include in obesity prevention programs. The cross-cultural differences that emerge may also inform adaptations to obesity prevention programs for Hispanic children.
| Perez, Marisol; Ohrt, Tara K; Bruening, Amanda B et al. (2018) Measurement equivalence of child feeding and eating measures across gender, ethnicity, and household food security. BMC Obes 5:17 |
| Wehrly, Sarah E; Bonilla, Chantal; Perez, Marisol et al. (2014) Controlling parental feeding practices and child body composition in ethnically and economically diverse preschool children. Appetite 73:163-71 |
