Open AccessEating behaviours of normal and overweight female undergraduate students in positive and negative emotions
Author(s) -
Suriati Sidek,
Nobuyuki Hassan,
Aliza Haslinda Hamirudin,
Wan Azdie Mohd Abu Bakar,
Tubanur Irfan Unal
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
food research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.218
H-Index - 7
ISSN - 2550-2166
DOI - 10.26656/fr.2017.5(2).477
Subject(s) - overweight , psychology , emotional eating , body mass index , clinical psychology , obesity , intervention (counseling) , eating disorders , developmental psychology , appetite , eating behavior , medicine , psychiatry
Emotional well-being affects eating behaviour, whether making an individual eat less ormore than they normally do. This paper aimed to compare eating behaviour betweennormal and overweight female undergraduate students in response to positive and negativeemotions. This cross-sectional study was conducted among 166 female universitystudents. Data collection involved the assessments of participants’ anthropometricmeasurements to obtain body mass index (BMI) and two self-administered questionnairesto measure of eating behaviour in positive and negative emotions; Emotional AppetiteQuestionnaire (EMAQ) and Eating Junk Food Questionnaire (EJFQ). Data from the twogroups were compared to obtain differences in eating behaviour between normal andoverweight female undergraduate students in response to positive and negative emotions.Both normal (Mean = 5.96±1.05) and overweight (Mean = 5.60±0.81) participantsreported no changes in the levels of eating under positive emotions. The results alsoshowed that both BMI categories “ate less” when they experienced negative emotions. ForEJFQ, there was no significant difference in eating junk food between normal andoverweight participants in response to positive emotions. However, the results revealedthat the overweight group has more tendency to choose pizza (X2(1) = 6.879), p = 0.009)and cake (X2(1) = 7.458, p = 0.006) than the normal group under negative emotions. Theseresults offer an insight that both BMI groups have almost similar eating-related concernsand thus intervention programs can be constructed on distressing eating-related thoughtsand emotions among female undergraduate students