Negative Affect and Situational Antecedents of Eating in Disordered Eating and Normal Population an Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

Abstract

The research examined the role of an affective state and immediate surrounds as possible antecedents of eating, utilising Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), repeated assessments of current psychological and situational states in participants’ natural environments. 136 adults [55 with disordered eating (DE) and 81 controls] were recruited from the community and they completed event-contingent and random assessments over a seven-day period. Psychological and situational variables relative to eating were investigated to test if there was a significant difference in negative affect, hunger levels, time and location. To account for the nesting of multiple categorical observations within subjects, data were analysed using generalised estimating equations and autoregressive correlation, a repeated measure MANOVA and paired-sample t-tests.Levels of guilt and disgust were higher at eating episodes in DE participants and feelings of guilt and dissatisfaction with self were higher after eating. Being at home and being alone were both found to act as antecedents for eating in DE, whereas controls were more likely to eat whilst out in social situations. The affective state of an individual and their surrounding context, appear to be integral to the eating patterns of individuals with DE.

Examining the Associations Between Online Interactions and Momentary Affect in Depressed Adolescents

“…A similar approach was used to ascertain if participants were more likely to report feeling better (vs. feeling no change) after an interaction with each type of communication partner, but using a logit link function (rather than an identity function) to account for the binary nature of the dependent variable. GEE is a modeling approach that allows for the specification of a working correlation structure and can, therefore, account for different types of relationships among data points and has regularly been used with EMA data (Schwartz and Stone 1998;Shiffman, Stone, and Hufford 2008) including those studying adolescent and adult affect and health behaviors (Shrier, Ross, and Blood 2014;Paganini, Peterson, and Mills 2019). The quasilikelihood under the independence model criterion (QIC) is a goodness of fit statistic that can be calculated for GEE models and used to select the most appropriate correlation structure.…”