Anxiety, fear and eating: A test of the psychosomatic concept of obesity.

Abstract

Psychosomatic theorizing about obesity has held that overeating by obese individuals represents an attempt to cope with fear, anxiety, or other emotional disturbances. To test this hypothesis, 33 obese and 33 normal weight male college students were subjected to control, interpersonal anxiety, or objective fear treatments. The 5s then completed the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List and took a digit span test. Food consumption was measured by having 5s eat crackers for 15 min. under the guise of making taste discriminations. Although there were indications that the experimental treatments had been successful in arousing anxiety for obese Ss, no significant differences in cracker consumption were found. It was concluded that the results cast considerable doubt upon the tenability of the psychosomatic concept of obesity.

Obesity, Child‐Feeding Attitudes, and Reactive Eating: An Intergenerational Study

“…McKenna (1972) observed that whereas obese subjects ate more under high-anxiety experimental conditions than under low-anxiety conditions, nonobese subjects ate less under high-anxiety conditions. However, Abramson and Wunderlich (1972) found no significant difference in the number of crackers eaten by obese subjects in control, fear, or anxiety situations.…”

Effects of physical threat and ego threat on eating behavior.

“…Abramson and Wunderlich (1972) exposed obese and normal-weight subjects to either a physical fear (anticipated electric shock) or ego threat ("interpersonal anxiety") manipulation, but neither manipulation affected eating, and the normalweight subjects did not even report any elevation of distress on manipulation check measures. In the present study, we set out to test behaviorally Herman et al's (1990) proposal using different sorts of distress manipulations concurrently.…”

Emotional Labeling and Overeating in Obese and Normal Weight Individuals

“…The major hypothesis for this study concerned the eating of obese subjects, and the obtained data suggest that the conclusions of earlier investigators (12,1,7) should be modified. These authors found, at best, a weak tendency for the obese to eat more when anxious.…”

“…Obese and normal subjects did not differ in self-reported arousal level, and the presence or absence of a label did not alter arousal level. 1 Those subjects in label conditions also answered the open-ended question, "What do you think produced your present heart rate level?" Nineteen of these 20 subjects said that the earphones had altered their heart rate.…”