The emotional eating scale: The development of a measure to assess coping with negative affect by eating

TLDR

The study describes the development of the Emotional Eating Scale (EES) to assess coping with negative affect by eating. The EES produced three subscales—Anger/Frustration, Anxiety, and Depression—that strongly correlated with binge eating, showed no association with general psychopathology or cognitive restraint, discriminated between obese binge eaters and anxiety‑disordered patients, and tracked treatment‑related changes in binge eating. The 25‑item scale is provided in an appendix, © 1995 John Wiley & Sons.

Abstract

The development of the Emotional Eating Scale (EES) is described. The factor solution replicated the scale's construction, revealing Anger/Frustration, Anxiety, and Depression subscales. All three subscales correlated highly with measures of binge eating, providing evidence of construct validity. None of the EES subscales correlated significantly with general measures of psychopathology. With few exceptions, changes in EES subscales correlated with treatment-related changes in binge eating. In support of the measure's discriminant efficiency, when compared with obese binge eaters, subscale scores of a sample of anxiety-disordered patients were significantly lower. Lack of correlation between a measure of cognitive restraint and EES subscales suggests that emotional eating may precipitate binge episodes among the obese independent of the level of restraint. The 25-item scale is presented in an Appendix (Arnow, B., Kenardy, J., & Agras, W.S.: International Journal of Eating Disorders, 17, 00-00, 1995). © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.