C85: Individual Difference Model of Stress Eating

College students undergo a lot of stress throughout the school year, and this can negatively impact their health in a variety of ways, notably their eating habits. Here we investigated how acute stressors, similar to that of college students’ every day lives, impact their eating behaviors, and whether individual differences are related to how they are impacted. Utilizing the individual difference model of stress eating, we investigated a number of personal factors, such as gender, religion, or socioeconomic status, to determine potential risk factors for maladaptive eating patterns in college-aged students. Participants entered the lab space twice for one hour each time, exactly one week apart. They were then randomly assigned to either a stressful interview or a neutral interview. Participants completed the other interview their second week. Post-interview, participants were given a plate of food and were able to choose between a healthy and an unhealthy option, and were able to eat however much they pleased, before completing a task that had them virtually choose between a number of healthy and unhealthy food options. For analysis, we used within-subjects designs for comparisons. The interview used in this experiment is a novel stressor task created by the experimenters. To analyze the efficacy of the interview as a stressor task, we utilized self-report measures of stress before the interview, after the interview, and after participants consumed food. We found that participants rated themselves as significantly more stressed after the stress condition interview, as compared to the neutral interview (p=0.007). Interestingly, we also found that individuals involved in Greek life had a significant change in the total number of calories consumed across conditions, but this finding did not translate to the other individual differences that were examined (p=0.04).

Authors: Abby Tietjen, Courtney Waters

Faculty Advisors: Dr. Joseph Johnson, Dr. April Smith, and Shelby Ortiz, Department of Psychology