Perceived Stress, Anger and Coping in Emotional Eaters Versus Normal Eaters among Adolescents: A Comparative Study

Eating problems are usually formed during childhood and teenage years when one learns that food and eating brings comfort to us when one is upset. As a result, instead of learning healthy ways to resolve and deal with feelings,many people learn to turn to food for emotional comfort to help reduce negative feelings. The present investigation is aimed to perceived stress, anger and coping between emotional eaters and normal eaters among adolescents. The sample of the present study comprised 376 adolescent participants (196 males and 180 females) from various government and private schools and colleges of Patiala District. Incidental sampling was done. The selected age range was 17 to 20 years. The two extreme groups on emotional eating were formed by taking transformed raw scores of emotional eating and taking the cutoff point of mean + ¹/₂ c. There were 100 adolescent emotional eaters and 100 normal eaters, t-test (for independent samples) was applied to draw comparisons between emotional eaters and non-emotional eaters and gender differences in emotional eaters on diverse measures, such as anger, ways of coping and perceived stress. The results of present investigation revealed that adolescent emotional eaters were high on perceived stress in comparison to normal eaters. Moreover, emotional eaters had ineffective ways of copmg to deal with the situation, while normal eaters showed more self-controlling and accepting responsibility, aspects of coping. Emotional eaters showed more trait anger than normal eaters, while the latter expressed anger more in comparison to the former. Therefore, it can be concluded that there is significant difference between normal eaters and emotional eaters in adolescents.