Solid or Liquid Food—The Intention to Eat Different Foods under Negative Emotions

Abstract

Food can relieve an individual’s emotions, especially for emotional eaters. For instance, chewing alleviates negative emotions. Solid and liquid foods comprise a huge part of our daily lives, and the chewiness of solid foods is always high. Here, we explored whether people, especially emotional eaters, have higher eating intentions to eat highly chewy foods while experiencing negative emotions by comparing their eating intentions toward solid and liquid foods. To this end, we conducted a survey of 147 participants using a questionnaire (Experiment 1) to understand their eating intention toward five types of food (purple potato, maize, black soya bean, mango, and soybean; each food group contained a solid food and a liquid food) while experiencing negative emotions. The results showed that individuals exhibited higher eating intention toward solid food compared with liquid food while experiencing negative emotions. In Experiment 2, we selected 85 and 65 high-emotional and low-emotional eaters, respectively, and further explored their preference for solid foods. The results showed that individuals with high levels of emotional eating exhibited higher intentions toward solid food while experiencing negative emotions compared with those with low levels of emotional eating. In conclusion, this study proved that individuals’ higher eating intentions toward highly chewable food were pronounced among individuals with high levels of emotional eating under negative emotion conditions.

Synthetic surprise as the foundation of the psychedelic experience

“…However, biases in judgment can arise when these appraisals stem from incidental emotions. In line with this idea, incidental emotions have an influence on risk-taking ( Ferrer and Ellis, 2021 , Edmans et al, 2007 , Hirshleifer and Shumway, 2003 , Schulreich et al, 2014 , Halko et al, 2015 , Yang et al, 2020 , Raghunathan and Pham, 1999 , Han et al, 2007 ), perceived life-satisfaction ( Schwarz and Clore, 1983 ), prosocial behavior ( Knapp and Clark, 1991 , Kassinove et al, 2002 , Drouvelis and Grosskopf, 2016 , Motro et al, 2016 , Desteno et al, 2014 , Bartlett and Desteno, 2006 ), food-choice and consumption ( Garg et al, 2007 , Wu et al, 2022 , Evers et al, 2018 ).…”