Perceived stress, coping and night‐eating in college students

Abstract

The present study investigated the role of coping in the relationship between perceived stress and night‐eating syndrome (NES) in college students. Participants were 95 undergraduates 18 to 29 years of age, and predominantly female and white or Caucasian. Anonymous paper‐and‐pencil surveys were completed on campus to measure NES, coping styles and level of perceived stress. Significant associations were found between perceived stress and NES (β = 0.259, p < 0.05), perceived stress and maladaptive coping (β = 0.575, p < 0.001) and maladaptive coping and NES (β = 0.252, p < 0.05). Mediation analyses indicate that experiencing higher levels of stress may lead to night‐eating behaviours because of use of maladaptive coping strategies. Furthermore, tests of moderation suggest that individuals who experienced stress and engaged in less adaptive coping were more likely to exhibit night‐eating behaviours (versus those who engaged in more adaptive coping). Of note is the differential impact of adaptive versus maladaptive coping in this association. Current findings provide some insights into possible mechanisms to weight gain in college students. Further, this information may be useful in guiding the development of interventions aimed at improving the psychosocial and behavioural health of college students. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Systematic Review of Studies Using the Brief COPE: Religious Coping in Factor Analyses

“…A common way to analyse Brief COPE scores was to combine the scores from the first eight sub-scales into one score (i.e., active coping, planning, positive reframing, acceptance, humor, turning to religion, emotional support, and instrumental support) and the remaining sub-scales into another (Tables 4). Of the 34 studies listed in Table 3, 12 had used this approach [77][78][79]81,83,85,90,91,102,103]. Four of these twelve studies [81,91,102,103] mentioned general theoretical considerations or did not provide any justification or reference.…”

“…Atkinson et al [77] referred to Lunsford et al [105], although Lunsford et al themselves had used the individual sub-scales separately. Hastings and Brown [79] and O'Connor et al [85] referred to Carver et al [10], and Gillen [78], Hirsch et al [109] and Wichianson et al [90] referred to Meyer [83], while Meyer himself had referred to Carver et al [112]. Studies that did not publish results from exploratory factor analyses of their own dataset (Table 3) therefore did not appear to have been influenced very much by the factor analytical results from studies using the Brief COPE-or at least the ones that met the criterion of the present review that turning to religion be included.…”

“…Compared to the studies that had conducted their own exploratory factor analyses, those that based their factor structure on previous research tended to have smaller samples sizes. Of the 34 studies listed in Table 3, 14 studies had a sample size of less than 100 [77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90]. Some of the studies had more than 300 participants [91][92][93], where a factor analysis would have been supported by a sufficiently large sample size.…”

The Playful Advantage: How Playfulness Enhances Coping with Stress

“…Perceived stress has also been found to relate to an assortment of psychosocial and physiological constructs, such as personality (Besser & Shackelford, 2007;Burgess, Irvine, & Wallymahmed, 2010;Candrian et al, 2008;Ebstrup, Eplov, Pisinger, & Jørgensen, 2011), affect (Besser & Shackelford, 2007;Cohen et al, 1993;Davidsdottir, 2007), self-efficacy (Ebstrup et al, 2011;Moeini et al, 2008;Trouillet, Gana, Lourel, & Fort, 2009), attachment (Cordon, Brown, & Gibson, 2009;Koopman et al, 2000;McCarthy, Moller, & Fouladi, 2001;Reiner, Anderson, Hall, & Hall, 2010), adjustment (Baker, 2004;Curtis, Groarke, Coughlan, & Gsel, 2004;Extremera, Durán, & Rey, 2007;Kulik & Heine-Cohen, 2011), depression (Candrian et al, 2008;Ghorbani, Krauss, Watson, & LeBreton, 2008;Holt-Lunstad, Birmingham, & Light, 2011), happiness (Brief, Burke, George, Robinson, & Webster, 1988;Chatters, 1988;Feist, Bodner, Jacobs, Miles, & Tan, 1995;Schiffrin & Nelson, 2010), health related behavior (Naquin & Gilbert, 1996;Rod, Grønbaek, Schnohr, Prescott, & Kristensen, 2009;Wichianson, Bughi, Unger, Spruijt-Metz, & Nguyen-Rodriguez, 2009), and health problems (Cohen et al, 1993;Lovell, Moss, Wetherell, 2011;Nielsen et al, 2008).…”

Effects of Foot Bath on Leg Edema and Fatigue among College Students

“…대학생은 발달 과정 상 청년후기에 속하여 의사결정이 필요한 순간을 경험하 기 시작하며 [7], 이로 인한 피로가 상당할 것으로 짐작된다. 더 불어 학업과 같은 정신노동은 육체노동에 비해 피로에 미치는 영향이 크다 [8].…”