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The role of emotional eating in the links between racial discrimination and physical and mental health

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Abstract

The environmental affordances (EA) model posits that maladaptive self-regulatory strategies (e.g., emotional eating) directly and indirectly heighten African Americans’ risk for downstream medical morbidities while also potentially mitigating the psychological impact of stressors. We empirically tested the full EA model. In doing so, we investigated the associations among racial discrimination, depressive symptomatology, and physical health proxies as well as the intervening role of emotional eating in these associations among 150 African Americans aged 18–27. The increased frequency of experiencing racial discrimination was significantly associated with poorer self-reported health, greater depressive symptomatology, and more emotional eating. There was no significant association between emotional eating and physical health and emotional eating did not mediate the relation between racial discrimination and physical health. Finally, racial discrimination was associated with depressive symptomatology, but only among African Americans with mean or high levels of emotional eating.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by funding awarded to the first author by the National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Division (537597).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Lori S. Hoggard

  2. Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Vanessa Volpe

  3. Department of Psychology, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

    Alvin Thomas

  4. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Ellie Wallace

  5. School of Social Work, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Katrina Ellis

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  1. Lori S. Hoggard
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Correspondence to Lori S. Hoggard.

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Lori S. Hoggard, Vanessa Volpe, Alvin Thomas, Ellie Wallace, and Katrina Ellis declares that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Hoggard, L.S., Volpe, V., Thomas, A. et al. The role of emotional eating in the links between racial discrimination and physical and mental health. J Behav Med 42, 1091–1103 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-019-00044-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-019-00044-1

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