Anxiety, hunger, and eating behavior.

The results suggest that for nondieters, anxiety suppresses hunger but has no effect when subjects are not initially hungry, and for dieters,xiety increases eating only when the subject is initially hungry.

Abstract

In this study we examined the effects of anxiety and food deprivation on the amount of food consumed ad lib by dieters and nondieters. Eighty female college students served as subjects in an ostensible market research study in which an anxiety manipulation was embedded. Reassignment of the subjects to anxiety condition on the basis of self-reported anxiety produced a significant (p < .02) three-way interaction among level of anxiety, food deprivation, and dieting status. The results suggest that (a) for nondieters, anxiety suppresses hunger but has no effect when subjects are not initially hungry, and (b) for dieters, anxiety increases eating only when the subject is initially hungry. These results are interpreted in terms of Herman and Polivy's (1984) boundary model of eating. Researchers have long viewed the effects of anxiety on eating as depending primarily on the type of person involved. Normal (nonobese, nondieting) people, who are presumably responsive to their physiological state, are expected to react to anxiety or stress by eating less. The physiological effects of stress include the inhibition of gastric contractions and the elevation of blood sugar, both of which ought to suppress hunger. Thus the normal individual, who uses such internal cues (or their correlates) as the basis for the regulation of eating, ought to eat less when stressed. Expectations regarding the effect of stress on overweight people are more variable. Early psychodynamic views (summarized by Kaplan & Kaplan, 1957) held that eating may reduce anxiety for some people; these people, owing to their reliance on eating to assuage distress, will in all likelihood become overweight. By the same token, we may expect obese people to respond to distress by overeating. Bruch (1961) developed an interesting variation on this theme. She argued that early mislabeling may lead some people to confuse emotional distress with hunger and to respond to such distress with eating; naturally, responding to an inappropriately wide range of internal cues might well promote obesity. In contrast, Schachter, Goldman, and Gordon (1968) posited that obese people ignore internal (physiological) cues and regulate their eating on the basis of external (environmental) cues. Exclusive dependence on such cues can promote long-term weight gain, but the manipulation of internal cues (including those induced by anxiety) alone ought to have no effect on the obese person's eating. This theory, then, suggests that obese people neither undereat (as would normal weight people) nor