Appetite 161 (2021) 105142

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Appetite
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/appet

Emotional reactivity, suppression of emotions and response inhibition in

emotional eaters: A multi-method pilot study
Ines Wolz a, *, Stefanie Biehl a, b, Jennifer Svaldi a
a
Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany
b
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Regensburg, Universitaetsstrasse 31, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Objective: Emotional eating has been associated with high emotional reactivity, suppression of negative emotions
Emotional eating and inhibitory control difficulties. The current study aimed to address the association of these factors and their
Emotional reactivity combined effect on emotional eating. Method: Twenty-eight participants conducted an emotional Go/Nogo task
Emotion regulation
including pictures of neutral, negative and positive scenes and an additional emotion suppression condition.
Response inhibition
Event-related potentials
Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded continuously. Emotional eating and habitual emotion
suppression were assessed through questionnaires. Emotional reactivity to affective pictures was measured
through a visual analogue scale and the amplitude of the electrophysiological late positive potential (LPP). In­
hibition parameters were assessed behaviorally (i.e., commission errors) and through event-related potentials of
the EEG (i.e., N2/P3-amplitudes).
Results: The trait questionnaire data revealed that emotional eating was not correlated with habitual emotion
suppression. During the emotional Go/Nogo paradigm, higher emotional eating scores were positively related to
higher LPP amplitudes in response to negative affective scenes. Inhibitory control capacities were not related to
emotional eating while watching neutral or negative pictures, but higher emotional eating scores were associated
with more commission errors when negative emotions were suppressed.
Discussion: Emotional eating tendencies seem to be related to higher reactivity when confronted with negative
affective information and inhibitory control deficits may arise especially when an effort is made to suppress these
negative emotions. Therefore, a focus on adaptive emotion regulation in treatments of emotional eating seems to
be important; solely targeting inhibitory control capacities may not be sufficient in order to help people with
emotional eating to regulate their food intake.

1. Introduction
Emotional eating refers to a tendency of people to react to emotions
by an increase or decrease in their habitual eating behavior (Macht,
2008). It is often included as a central factor in models of eating disor­
ders and pathological eating behaviors such as overeating and binge
eating (Haedt-Matt & Keel, 2011; van Strien, Engels, Van Leeuwe, &
Snoek, 2005).
Research has shown that especially diffuse negative emotions are
related to an increase in food intake and that people differ in the strength
of their tendency to emotional eating (van Strien, Frijters, Bergers, &
Defares, 1986). Furthermore, a study on appetitive conditioning showed
that, in people with high emotional eating tendencies, the mere expec­
tation of subsequent food intake can attenuate negative feelings
(Bongers & Jansen, 2017). In this context, it has been suggested that
emotional eating in response to negative emotions can be seen as an
attempt to regulate negative emotions (van Strien, 2018). Thus, inter­
individual differences in the effects of negative emotions on food intake
may be due to difficulties regulating negative emotions in a more
adaptive way.
Another explaining factor may be a quicker, more intense and/or
longer subjective and physiological reaction (i.e., emotional reactivity)
to negative stimuli. Indeed, higher negative emotional reactivity in
young children has been shown to predict emotional eating later in life
(Steinsbekk, Barker, Llewellyn, Fildes, & Wichstrøm, 2018). The effect
of emotional reactivity on emotional eating was also shown to be
mediated by emotion regulation difficulties (Braden et al., 2020).
Furthermore, individuals with eating disorders self-report a higher

* Corresponding author. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
E-mail address: ines.wolz@uni-tuebingen.de (I. Wolz).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105142
Received 22 August 2020; Received in revised form 21 December 2020; Accepted 22 January 2021
Available online 1 February 2021
0195-6663/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
I. Wolz et al.
emotional reactivity (Nock, Wedig, Holmberg, & Hooley, 2008), more
problems regulating and accepting their emotions than healthy controls,
and a more frequent engagement in suppression of negative emotions
(Prefit, Cândea, & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2019). More directly, emotion
suppression as a dysfunctional emotion regulation strategy (Gross &
John, 2003) has been shown to significantly increase food intake spe­
cifically in people with emotional eating (e.g. Evers, Stok, & de Ridder,
2010). These studies suggest that individual learning history and
interindividual differences in both emotional reactivity and emotion
regulation abilities may contribute to the explanation of differences in
emotional eating. More specifically, a higher reactivity to negative
emotional cues in combination with the tendency to suppress these
negative emotions might contribute to emotional eating tendencies.
In addition to an increased emotional reactivity and a dysfunctional
emotion regulation, emotional eating has also been associated with
reduced inhibitory control capacities (Jasinska et al., 2012). As a part of
executive functioning, inhibitory control may be divided into behavioral
and cognitive inhibition. Behavioral inhibition refers to the ability to
inhibit prepotent responses or actions in order to adapt behavior to a
more adaptive response or to new information (Bari & Robbins, 2013). It
is often assessed by the Go/Nogo task, in which participants are
instructed to react to a frequent stimulus (Go-trial) and to inhibit their
response to a less frequent stimulus (Nogo-trial). Commission errors in
Nogo-trials are used as a measure of inhibitory control.
Of note, food-related inhibitory capacities have been shown to
interact with negative mood and emotion regulation difficulties. As
such, in an ecological momentary assessment study lower momentary
inhibitory control only led to loss of control over food intake when
participants were simultaneously in a negative mood (Smith et al.,
2020). Furthermore, research shows that regulatory resources are
limited (Baumeister & Vohs, 2007) and that emotion suppression is
related to impaired executive functioning (Franchow & Suchy, 2015).
This suggests that the tendency of people with emotional eating to
suppress emotions may lead to impaired inhibitory control, especially
when suppressing emotions evoked by negative emotional cues. Despite
single contributions of empirical studies relating to emotional reactivity,
emotional suppression, and inhibitory control, the interaction of these in
the occurrence of emotional eating is yet unclear.
In line with what just mentioned, the current study aimed to assess
the interaction of reactivity to negative emotional cues, emotional
suppression and inhibitory control in relation to emotional eating in an
emotional Go/Nogo task. In contrast to a conventional Go/Nogo task,
the emotional Go/Nogo task allows the assessment of the interaction
between emotional processing and inhibitory control (Schulz et al.,
2007) by either substituting the neutral stimuli with affective stimuli or
by adding affective stimuli to neutral Go/Nogo stimuli (Chester et al.,
2016). Since effects of emotional stimuli on inhibitory performance in
emotional Go/Nogo tasks are variable and incongruent between studies
(e.g. Chester et al., 2016; Schulz et al., 2007; Yang et al., 2014), it has
been proposed and empirically shown that the effect depends on the
level of arousal elicited by these stimuli, whereby higher arousal is
related to a decrease in inhibitory performance (Pessoa, Padmala,
Kenzer, & Bauer, 2012). Differing effects of emotional cues in Go/Nogo
tasks are furthermore ascribed to interindividual differences in
emotional well-being and emotion regulation (Myruski, Bonanno,
Gulyayeva, Egan, & Dennis-Tiwary, 2017; Zhang et al., 2016).
In order to assess the effects of suppression of negative emotions
within this paradigm, the negative condition of the emotional Go/Nogo
task was combined with instructions to either suppress or react naturally
to any upcoming emotions while processing the (valenced) pictures.
Dependent variables were self-reported subjective arousal and neural
affective reactivity to negative, neutral and positive emotional cues, as
well as inhibitory control in an emotional Go/Nogo task with a neutral,
negative and negative suppression condition as assessed by both
response accuracy and electroencephalographic brain activity.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) has a high time resolution and event-
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Appetite 161 (2021) 105142
related potentials (ERP) can thus depict the time course of neural ac­
tivity related to both visual stimulus processing and response inhibition.
With regard to visual processing, mid- to late-latency ERP such as the
late positive potential (LPP) can capture emotional reactivity to stimuli:
higher subjective emotional arousal of visual stimuli is related to higher
LPP amplitudes (Schupp, Flaisch, Stockburger, & Junghöfer, 2006). As
for inhibitory control, the response-related N2/P3-complex in response
inhibition tasks is seen as a marker of inhibitory control capacities
(Huster, Enriquez-Geppert, Lavallee, Falkenstein, & Herrmann, 2013).
Both ERP show higher peak amplitudes in Nogo- than in Go-trials and
the N2 also scales individual task success with more pronounced am­
plitudes being related to better task performance (i.e., fewer commission
errors in Nogo-trials) (Falkenstein, Hoormann, & Hohnsbein, 1999). The
magnitude of these ERP is also influenced by stimulus arousal and
valence in emotional Go/Nogo tasks (Yang et al., 2014; Zhang et al.,
2016), even if the emotional stimuli are task-irrelevant (Zhao, Lin, Xie,
& Liu, 2019), indicating an impairment of response inhibition through
emotional stimulus content. While interaction effects between
emotional content and task condition (Go- vs. Nogo-trial) are inconsis­
tent, all of these studies find that N2 amplitudes are decreased and P3
amplitudes are increased with emotional compared to neutral stimuli.
These effects are interpreted in terms of a limited resource model: while
emotional content might lead to a reduction in inhibition-related task
performance in earlier stages (decreased N2 amplitudes), increased P3
amplitudes might indicate a compensation in attentional resource allo­
cation in later stages (Zhao et al., 2019).
The current study aimed to investigate the relation between
emotional eating and emotional reactivity, suppression of emotions and
inhibitory control in a combined paradigm. It was hypothesized that
emotional eating would be related to a more frequent engagement in
habitual emotion suppression as assessed through self-report (H1),
higher reactivity in response to negative emotional scenes as assessed
trough self-report and LPP amplitudes (H2), and lower inhibitory con­
trol capacities as assessed through commission errors and N2/P3-
amplitudes in the Go/Nogo task (H3). Regarding inhibitory control, it
was further hypothesized that the positive association between
emotional eating and inhibitory control deficits would be less pro­
nounced in the neutral condition (H3.1), stronger in an emotionally
negative condition (H3.2) and strongest when suppressing negative
emotions (H3.3).
2. Methods
2.1. Participants
Twenty-eight healthy normal-weight women with a mean age of
21.61 years (SD 2.82) participated in the study; they received course
credit for their participation and could win one out of five vouchers.
Eligibility was assessed in a standardized telephone interview, exclusion
criteria were age <18 years, lacking German language skills, and current
or past diagnosis of a mental or neurological disorder, which was
assessed through self-report by asking the participant whether they had
ever been diagnosed with any psychological disorder and, if affirmative,
whether they still suffered from it. The study was performed according
to the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the local ethics
committee.
2.2. Procedure
After the telephone screening, participants came in for a laboratory
session, where they participated in two separate experiments. After
signing informed consent, participants filled in the self-report ques­
tionnaires through an online platform. They were then seated in front of
a computer monitor and the EEG was mounted. Participants then
completed the emotional Go/Nogo paradigm. Due to the negative con­
tents of the pictures, participants received a neutral mood induction
I. Wolz et al.
through a guided imagery after completion of the experimental
procedure.
2.3. Stimuli and task
The stimulus set consisted of 60 negative, 30 positive and 30 neutral
picture scenes taken from the International Affective Picture System
(IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997). The negative and positive
scenes were matched with regard to arousal ratings, examples of the
content of the pictures are shown in Fig. 1.
The emotional Go/Nogo task was an adapted version of the task used
by Chester et al. (2016) and included four different conditions: each
emotional valence (i.e., positive, negative and neutral pictures) in a
“watch” condition, and an additional negative valence block with an
instruction to suppress the experience and the expression of any up­
coming emotion. In the “watch” condition, participants were instructed
to react naturally to any emotions they were feeling while watching the
pictures. Each condition was presented in six blocks in
pseudo-randomized order; there was a 15 s break between the blocks.
Each block started with a short instruction regarding emotion
regulation (“watch” vs. “suppression”) and consisted of ten trials of the
same condition. Each trial started with a fixation-cross presented for
500 ms, followed by a picture presented for 2000 ms. One second after
the picture onset, a letter appeared in the middle of the screen on top of
the picture. Participants were instructed to react as fast as possible by
pressing a key whenever the letter “M” appeared (Go-trial) and to not
react if the letter “W” appeared (Nogo-trial). The Go/Nogo ratio was 70/
30, the trial succession was fully randomized within one block. Partic­
ipants completed at least 20 practice trials before starting the experi­
mental task. See Fig. 1 for examples of stimuli and trial succession and
supplementary material for a detailed description of task instructions.
2.4. Measures
2.4.1. Manipulation check
To control for the regulation success after each block, participants
were asked three questions regarding the implementation of the in­
struction given at the beginning of the block: 1) “I could successfully
implement the instruction regarding the regulation of my emotions”; 2)
“In the previous block I reacted as I naturally would”; 3) “In the previous
block I suppressed my emotions”. These questions were answered on a
visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (“totally disagree”) to 100
(“totally agree”). Furthermore, to check whether the pictures had an
effect on participants’ mood, subjective valence and arousal were
assessed using a 2-dimensional affect grid (Russell, Weiss, & Mendel­
sohn, 1989) asking participants to rate their current mood on the di­
mensions valence and arousal, each visual analogue scale ranging from
− 100 (“very unpleasant”/“very activated”) to 100 (“very pleas­
ant”/“very relaxed/sleepy”).
2.4.2. Assessment of emotional eating and emotional suppression
Emotional Eating was assessed by the Dutch Eating Behavior Ques­
tionnaire (DEBQ; van Strien et al., 1986; German version:; Nagl, Hilbert,
Fig. 1. Stimuli and trial succession of the emotional go/no-go task.
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Appetite 161 (2021) 105142
De Zwaan, Braehler, & Kersting, 2016), a validated self-report ques­
tionnaire that measures emotional eating on 10 items (e.g. “When I’m
irritated, I have a desire to eat.“) ranging from 1 (“never”) to 5 (“very
often”). Internal consistency of the emotional eating scale in the current
sample was good (Cronbach’s alpha = .85) and comparable to the
validation study (van Strien et al., 1986).
Emotional suppression was assessed by the Emotion Regulation
Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003; German version: (Abler &
Kessler, 2009), a validated questionnaire used to assess the habitual use
of reappraisal and suppression. The suppression subscale includes four
items (e.g. “I control my emotions by not expressing them”) ranging from 1
to 7; higher values indicate higher habitual emotion suppression. In­
ternal consistency in the current sample was poor (Cronbach’s α = 0.55)
and lower than in the validation study (Gross & John, 2003), where
values between 0.68 and 0.76 are reported. An analysis of the item
structure showed that excluding item 4 led to a better internal consis­
tency (α = 0.68), which was then comparable to the validation study;
therefore, the analyses were calculated with this 3-item version of the
ERQ suppression subscale.
2.4.3. Emotional reactivity
Emotional reactivity was operationalized through assessment of sub­
jective arousal on a VAS ranging from − 100 (“very low arousal”) to 100
(“very high arousal”) and through the amplitude of the LPP. The LPP
was measured at the Pz electrode as the mean activity (μV) in two time
windows: 400–700 ms (early LPP) and 700–1000 ms (late LPP) after
stimulus onset. In order to assess emotional reactivity in the negative
condition, the difference between the neutral and negative “watch”
condition was calculated for each outcome; a more negative value in­
dicates higher emotional reactivity in the negative relative to the neutral
condition:
1) VAS subjective arousal: arousalnegative – arousalneutral
2) LPP amplitude: mean activation in μVnegative – μVneutral
The same was done for the positive condition as a control, to ensure
that effects were not merely related to high arousal, but also to the
stimulus valence.
2.4.4. Inhibitory control
Inhibitory control was measured during the emotional Go/Nogo task
both by the number of commission errors and through N2/P3-
amplitudes. Thereby, response accuracy was calculated as the percent­
age of correct trials per condition. The percentage of commission errors
per condition was calculated as a measure of behavioral inhibition. On a
neural level, inhibition was measured through the peak amplitudes of
the response-related N2/P3 complex at Fz, which is associated with
inhibitory control (Huster et al., 2013). The N2 was calculated as the
maximum peak activation at Fz in the time window 280–400 ms after
Go/Nogo stimulus onset, the P3 was calculated as the maximum peak
350–550 ms after Go/Nogo stimulus onset at Fz (Falkenstein et al., 1999;
Huster et al., 2013).
2.4.5. Electroencephalographic recording and data pre-processing
Electroencephalogram was recorded continuously during the
emotional Go/Nogo task with a sampling rate of 500 Hz through 32
active Ag/AgCl electrodes mounted in an actiCap using the 10–20 sys­
tem (BrainProducts GmbH); four passive electrodes were used to mea­
sure horizontal and vertical eye movements. Impedances were kept at <
15 kΩ, the Cz electrode was used as online reference, the ground elec­
trode was placed at AFz, no online filters were used. For the offline
analysis of ERP, the sampling rate was reduced to 256 Hz, re-referenced
to an average reference and filtered using a high-pass filter of 0.2 Hz, a
low-pass filter of 30 Hz and a 50 Hz notch filter. Horizontal and vertical
eye movements were corrected using independent component analysis
(ICA). Muscle and other artefacts were removed through manual raw
I. Wolz et al.
data inspection before the ICA and an automatic inspection method to
remove remaining artefacts after the ICA (maximal allowed voltage step
50 μV/ms, maximal allowed difference of values in 100 ms intervals:
150 μV, min/max allowed amplitude ±200 μV, activity <0.5 μV). Par­
ticipants, where less than 10 epochs per condition remained after arte­
fact correction, were excluded from the EEG data analysis. This was true
for two participants where the EEG recording was not complete due to a
technical failure; therefore, the EEG results are based on the data of 26
participants only. The mean number of segments/condition are shown
in Table S1.
Following these pre-processing steps, data were segmented into
epochs starting 200 ms before stimulus onset and until 1000 ms after
picture stimulus onset for the analysis of the LPP. For the analysis of the
N2/P3 complex, the onset of the Go/Nogo stimulus (1s after onset of the
picture stimulus) was used as time 0 and segmentation started 200 ms
before this onset and ended 1000 ms afterwards.
2.5. Statistical analyses
Normal distribution of all variables was tested using Kolmogorov-
Smirnoff tests and Mauchly-tests were used to test sphericity in
repeated measures analyses. In case of non-sphericity, Greenhouse-
Geisser corrected values are reported. In correlation analyses, pearson
correlations were calculated for normally distributed data, for non-
normally distributed data, spearman correlations were calculated.
Furthermore, bootstrapping with 1000 resamples was used to calculate
bias corrected and accelerated 95%- confidence intervals (BCa 95%-CI)
of the correlation coefficients to test the robustness of the results. The
hypotheses described in the introduction were formulated beforehand
and data analyses were conducted according to the following pre-
specified data analytic plan.
For the manipulation check (implementation success, level of sup­
pression, level of natural reaction) and mood variables (valence and
arousal), Analyses of Variance (ANOVA) with the repeated measures
factor condition (positive, negative “watch”, negative “suppress” and
neutral) and pairwise comparisons between the four conditions were
calculated. As a further preliminary data analysis, condition effects of
the task were also explored for behavioral and electrophysiological
variables. To this aim, a repeated measures ANOVA with the factor
condition (positive, negative “watch”, negative “suppress” and neutral)
was calculated for LPP mean activation and for commission errors, and a
4 (condition: positive, negative “watch”, negative “suppress” and neu­
tral)*2 (trial type: Go vs. Nogo) repeated measures ANOVA was
analyzed for N2/P3-amplitudes.
To test the pre-specified hypotheses, correlations between the DEBQ
emotional eating subscale and the respective outcomes were calculated:
i.e., for H1 the ERQ suppression subscale, for H2 subjective arousal and
LPP mean activation in the negative-neutral condition and for H3 the
percentage of commission errors and N2/P3-amplitudes in Nogo trials
during neutral (H3.1), negative “watch” (H3.2), and negative “suppress”
blocks (H3.3). For emotional reactivity (H2), correlation coefficients
were also calculated for the positive condition to test whether effects
were specific to emotional reactivity to negative stimuli.
3. Results
3.1. Preliminary analyses
3.1.1. Manipulation check
The manipulation check showed that participants rated the imple­
mentation success as medium to high (see Fig. S1 for M and SD); there
was a significant condition effect (F [2,50] = 23.91, p < .001), pairwise
comparisons showed significantly higher implementation success in the
neutral and positive “watch” conditions than in the negative conditions,
and in the negative “watch” than in the negative “suppress” condition
(ps < .05).
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Appetite 161 (2021) 105142
The rating of “reacted naturally” was also different between condi­
tions (F [2,44] = 107.27, p < .001), pairwise comparisons showed
significantly lower ratings in the “suppress” condition than in the
“watch” conditions (ps < .001). It did not differ between the positive and
neutral blocks (p = .84), but was significantly higher in the positive and
neutral blocks relative to the negative block (ps < .05).
As intended, there was a significant condition effect for the sup­
pression of emotions (F [3,81] = 23.80, p < .001): participants rated
“suppressed emotions” higher in the “suppress” condition than in all
“watch” conditions (ps < .001). However, they also suppressed signifi­
cantly more in the negative “watch” than in the positive and neutral
“watch” conditions (ps < .05), which did not differ significantly (p =
.52).
As expected, means of valence were highest in the positive “watch”
condition (M = 22.50, SD = 36.97), followed by the neutral condition
(M = 11.35, SD = 35.84) and lowest in the negative “watch” (M =
− 47.08, SD = 25.86) and “suppress” (M = − 40.00, SD = 25.43) con­
ditions and the main effect of condition was significant (F [2,40] =
58.17, p < .001). The negative “watch” and “suppress” blocks did not
differ significantly (p = .12), all other conditions differed on a signifi­
cance level of p < .001. There was also a significant main effect of
condition for subjective arousal (F[2,52] = 6.81, p < .01), with signif­
icantly lower arousal in the neutral than in the emotional conditions (ps
< .05), which did not differ significantly (ps > .16).
3.1.2. Task effects on behavioral and electrophysiological outcomes
Descriptive statistics for emotional reactivity and inhibitory control
can be found in Table 1, a graphical representation of the electrophys­
iological activity is shown in Fig. 2. There was a significant main effect
of condition for the early (F [2,61] = 23.80, p < .001) and late (F [3,81]
= 17.21, p < .001) LPP (see Fig. 2A). The mean amplitude was signif­
icantly lower in the neutral and positive than in the negative conditions
(ps < .05). Although the amplitude in the “suppress” condition was
descriptively smaller than in the negative “watch” condition, these two
did not differ significantly both for the early (p = .08) and late LPP (p =
.14).
The mean Go/Nogo accuracy in the four conditions ranged from
96.32 to 99.23% in Go-trials and from 85.71 to 94.02% in Nogo-trials.
For commission errors, the mean percentage was between 6.20 and
15.02% (see Table 1) and there was a significant condition effect (F
[3,81] = 9.30, p < .001). Pairwise comparisons showed more com­
mission errors in the negative “suppress” condition compared to all
other conditions, and in the negative “watch” than in the neutral con­
dition (ps < .05). All other conditions did not differ significantly (ps >
.09). Additional analyses related to reaction times in Go-trials can be
found in the supplementary material (section 2).
Unsurprisingly, N2 (F [1,25] = 62.11, p < .001; Fig. 2B) and P3 (F
[1,25] = 46.15, p < .001; Fig. 2B) amplitudes were significantly more
pronounced in Nogo-trials than in Go-trials. Furthermore, there was a
significant main effect of condition for N2 amplitudes (F [2,45] = 12.24,
p < .001), with significantly less pronounced amplitudes in the negative
“suppress” condition than in all other conditions and lower amplitudes
in the negative “watch” than in the neutral and positive conditions (ps <
.05), which did not differ significantly (ps > .07). For P3 amplitudes, the
main effect of condition was not significant (F(3,75) = 1.52, p = .22)
(see Fig. 2B and C for topographies and wave forms of the N2/P3-
complex).
3.2. Principle analyses
3.2.1. H1: Emotional eating and habitual emotion suppression
Emotional eating in the sample ranged from a mean score of 1.00 to
3.10, the sample mean was 1.93 (SD = 0.58). The mean of self-reported
habitual emotion suppression was 3.12 (SD = 1.09, range: 1.00–5.00).
Higher emotional eating values were not related to higher habitual
emotion suppression, r = − 0.01 (BCa 95%-CI: [-0.41, 0.39]), p = .48.
I. Wolz et al. Appetite 161 (2021) 105142

Table 1
Descriptive values for the outcome measures emotional reactivity (subjective arousal, LPP mean activation) and inhibitory control (accuracy and commission errors
during the Go/Nogo task, peak amplitudes of the N2/P3 complex).
Positive “watch” Negative “watch” Negative “suppress” Neutral “watch"

M SD M SD M SD M SD

Emotional reactivity Arousal − 11.10 30.69 − 11.94 35.51 − 16.25 36.81 − 28.90 25.40
Early LPP 2.71 2.38 4.09 2.72 3.64 1.99 1.95 1.81
Late LPP 0.47 1.93 1.67 2.27 1.27 1.69 − 0.34 1.74
Inhibitory control Go accuracy 97.79 3.72 96.32 6.98 97.28 5.89 99.23 1.30
Nogo accuracy 93.02 7.50 89.97 8.50 85.71 12.60 94.02 6.40
Commission errors 7.65 7.24 10.41 8.43 15.02 12.30 6.20 6.41
Go N2 − 2.75 2.03 − 2.30 2.09 − 2.40 2.09 − 3.35 1.65
Nogo N2 − 5.18 2.46 − 4.35 2.77 − 3.61 2.51 − 5.65 2.90
Go P3 0.42 1.72 0.54 1.73 0.63 1.30 0.55 1.26
Nogo P3 2.46 2.63 2.44 2.94 2.95 2.30 3.46 2.37

Note: LPP = Late positive potential, mean activation at Pz in μV 400–700 ms after stimulus onset (early LPP) and 700–1000 ms after stimulus onset. Arousal was
measured on a visual analogue scale ranging from − 100 (“very low arousal”) to 100 (“very high arousal”). Go accuracy is specified as the mean percentage of correct
button presses (i.e. “hits”) in Go trials, Nogo accuracy is specified as the mean percentage of correct rejections in Nogo trials, commission errors are specified as the
mean percentage of incorrect button presses in Nogo trials. N2 values refer to the maximum peak in μV between 280 and 400 ms at Fz electrode, P3 values refer to the
maximum peak in μV between 350 and 550 ms after Go/Nogo stimulus onset at Fz electrode.

[0.13, 0.69], p < .05) and r = 0.41 (BCa 95%-CI: [0.05, 0.67], p < .05),
respectively. No significant associations were found for the positive
condition (μV positive-neutral), with r = 0.27 (BCa 95%-CI: [-0.16, 0.60], p
= .09) in the early LPP and r = .02 (BCa 95%-CI: [-0.27, 0.45], p = .47)
in the late LPP time window.

3.2.3. H3: Emotional eating and inhibitory control

Emotional eating scores were neither significantly associated with
commission errors in the neutral (rs = 0.16, BCa 95%-CI [-0.26, 0.57], p
= .40) nor in the negative “watch” condition (rs = 0.20, BCa 95%-CI:
[-0.16, 0.54], p = .30). However, higher emotional eating was signifi­
cantly related to more commission errors in the negative “suppress”
condition, r = 0.43, BCa 95%-CI: [0.08, 0.67], p < .05. Emotional eating
was not significantly related to N2 nor to P3 amplitudes in any condition
(N2 neutral: rs = − 0.02, BCa 95%-CI: [-0.36, 0.33], negative “watch”: rs
= − 0.11, BCa 95%-CI: [-0.49, 0.28], negative “suppress”: rs = − 0.09,
BCa 95%-CI: [-0.49, 0.32], ps > .6; P3 neutral: r = − 0.33, BCa 95%-CI:
[-0.63, 0.03], negative “watch”: r = − 0.21, BCa 95%-CI: [-0.56, 0.17],
negative “suppress”: r = -0.09, BCa 95%-CI: [-0.49, 0.36], ps > .1).

Fig. 2. Waveform and scalp topographies for event-related potentials during
the emotional go/no-go task.
A: Event-related potentials of the electroencephalogram after picture onset for
neutral, positive and negative “watch” conditions and for the negative “sup­
press” condition. The Late Positive Potential (LPP) was calculated as the mean
activity in μV in an early (400–700 ms, highlighted in blue) and late (700–1000
ms, highlighted in yellow) time window. B: Waveform of the N2/P3 complex in
response to Go- vs. Nogo-trials during neutral, positive and negative “watch”
and negative “suppress” conditions. The N2 was calculated as the maximum
negative deflection in μV in the time window 280–400 ms (highlighted in blue),
the P3 was calculated as the peak activation in μV in the time window 350–550
ms after stimulus onset (highlighted in yellow). C: Scalp topographies of elec­
trophysiological activation for Go- and Nogo-trials in the four conditions, time
windows 280–400 ms and 350–550 ms after Go/Nogo-stimulus onset for N2
and P3 components, respectively. (For interpretation of the references to colour
in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
3.2.2. H2: Emotional eating and emotional reactivity
Emotional eating was not significantly related to the difference in
subjective arousal between negative and neutral scenes, rs = 0.15, (BCa
95%-CI: [-0.26, 0.49], p = .45) or positive and neutral scenes, rs = 0.14,
(BCa 95%-CI: [-0.21, 0.45], p = .47).
Emotional eating was significantly positively related to the differ­
ence wave in LPP amplitude for the negative condition (μV negative-neutral)
in the early and in the late LPP time window, with r = 0.48 (BCa 95%-CI:
4. Discussion
The current study aimed to assess emotional reactivity, emotion
suppression and inhibitory control during an emotional Go/Nogo task
and its association to emotional eating. Emotional eating was hypothe­
sized to be related to a stronger use of habitual emotion suppression
(H1), which was not supported by the data. Negative emotional scenes
led to higher reactivity as measured by subjective arousal and LPP mean
activity than neutral scenes. While subjective arousal was not signifi­
cantly related to emotional eating, the difference wave of the LPP
amplitude between activation in negative and neutral trials showed a
significant association, thus partly supporting hypothesis 2. Emotional
eating was neither related to response inhibition as measured by com­
mission errors and N2/P3 amplitudes in the neutral (H3.1) nor in the
negative “watch” condition (H3.2). It was, however, significantly asso­
ciated with the percentage of commission errors in the negative “sup­
press” condition (H3.3), which partly supports hypothesis 3.
During the emotional Go/Nogo task, our commission error rate was
comparable to other studies using emotional Go/Nogo tasks (Chester
et al., 2016; Schulz et al., 2007). Overall, more commission errors were
made in the negative conditions than in the positive and neutral con­
ditions. In the negative “suppress” condition there were even more
commission errors than in the negative “watch” condition. Suppression
of emotions may lead to cognitive load (Wang & Yang, 2014) and
thereby reduce capacities for behavioral inhibition. This assumption is

5
I. Wolz et al.
supported by the reduced N2 amplitudes and increased commission
errors in the negative “suppress” condition relative to the negative
“watch” condition. Thus, suppression might be counterproductive for
behavioral inhibition in ongoing tasks.
In contrast to our expectations, emotion suppression and subjective
arousal were not significantly related to emotional eating. Nonetheless,
higher emotional eating scores were associated with relatively higher
LPP amplitudes specifically when watching negative scenes. This in­
dicates that emotional eating tendencies might be related to increased
neural reactivity specifically to negative stimuli. Furthermore,
emotional eating was not related to general inhibitory control deficits,
but was associated with higher behavioral inhibitory control difficulties
only while suppressing negative emotions. Hence, the difficulty to inhibit
behavioral responses while regulating negative emotions may
contribute to disinhibited food intake while experiencing negative
emotions. General deficits in response inhibition were also not found in
samples with obese participants, where behavioral performance was
similar between obese and normal-weight participants (Calvo, Galioto,
Gunstad, & Spitznagel, 2014; Houben, Nederkoorn, & Jansen, 2014;
Wen & Tsai, 2020) and N2 amplitudes were higher in obese compared to
normal-weight participants (Wen & Tsai, 2020). Therefore, inhibitory
control difficulties related to disordered food intake might arise mainly
in specific situations such as negative emotions and/or in relation to
specific stimuli, such as in face of high caloric food stimuli (e.g. Bat­
terink, Yokum, & Stice, 2010; Houben et al., 2014; Liu, Gao, Zhao,
Zhang, & Chen, 2020; Nederkoorn, Coelho, Guerrieri, Houben, & Jan­
sen, 2012). The results of the current study suggest that people with
emotional eating tendencies have response inhibition difficulties spe­
cifically when suppressing negative emotions and therefore could
benefit from a training in adaptive regulation of negative emotions in
combination with an improvement of inhibitory control capacities
related to these situations.
The multi-method approach is a strength of the study at hand;
however, subjective, behavioral and neural outcomes did not fully align.
With regard to emotional reactivity, the expected results were only
found on a neural, but not on the subjective outcome level and with
regard to inhibitory control, results were only found on the behavioral
but not on the neural outcome level. This incoherence may be due to the
small sample size and/or the assessment instruments. As for emotional
reactivity, the subjective measure consisted of a VAS measuring affec­
tive arousal and the manipulation check showed the expected pattern of
higher arousal for emotional than for neutral pictures. At the same time,
the scale may not be sensitive enough to capture slight individual dif­
ferences in emotional reactivity, including activation, intensity and
duration. Furthermore, the LPP depicts emotional reactivity during the
processing of the emotional scene, while subjective arousal was
measured after 10 trials of an emotional valence block. As such, a
temporally more proximal measure of subjective arousal could have led
to more coherence in the results.
With regard to N2/P3-amplitudes, a positive correlation to com­
mission errors should be expected from results of former research (Fal­
kenstein et al., 1999). Against this, the current study did not show an
association between behavioral and neural measures of inhibitory con­
trol. There was, however, a significant condition effect on
N2-amplitudes, with lower amplitudes in the negative conditions than in
the positive and neutral conditions. This suggests that effects of the task
and affective content of the pictures may have influenced the magnitude
of the N2/P3- amplitudes in addition to inhibitory processes, which may
have blunted the association. This is in line with results of other
emotional Go/Nogo studies reporting comparably lower N2 amplitudes
in trials with task-irrelevant emotional stimuli compared to neutral
stimuli (Zhao et al., 2019) and studies where correlations between
N2/P3-amplitudes and commission errors were not consistently found
for different emotional valence categories (Duan, Wang, & Wu, 2018;
Zhang et al., 2016). Furthermore, the Go/Nogo-stimulus onset was not
jittered in our study, which could have led to higher predictability and
6
Appetite 161 (2021) 105142
thus have influenced the Go/Nogo-reaction.
Future studies might also use other electrophysiological measures of
cognitive control to support and amplify the findings related to the
analysis of ERP peak amplitudes, such as frontal midline theta activity as
an indicator of conflict monitoring and cognitive control, generated in
the midcingulate cortex (Cavanagh & Shackman, 2015). More specif­
ically, as deduced from time-frequency analyses, activity in the theta
frequency range represents the neural generation of the N2 and P3
components in Go/Nogo tasks and thus reflects inhibitory control on
another scale (Harper, Malone, & Bernat, 2014; Yamanaka & Yama­
moto, 2010). Therefore, analyzing frontal midline theta activation
together with source localization techniques can bring about additional
information about the neural generators and nature of activity under­
lying effects in response inhibition tasks.1
The current study is limited through its small sample size (a post-hoc
power analysis showed that with a sample size of n = 28 and an alpha-
level of 0.05, the power for a medium effect size with r = 0.3 is 1-β =
0.47) and the assessment of emotional eating in a healthy sample. As
such, the association between emotional eating and suppression may be
stronger in samples with higher mean emotional eating scores (Samuel
& Cohen, 2018) and results should be replicated in a larger sample
including participants with extreme values in emotional eating ten­
dencies. The assessment of habitual emotion suppression was conducted
through a commonly used and validated scale; however, the scale uses
only four items to assess emotion suppression and reliability values
especially in the current sample were poor. Although reliability
improved through exclusion of one item, a more elaborate measure of
emotion suppression may have led to different results. Aside from that,
the external validity of the emotional eating scale was critically dis­
cussed in the scientific community (Bongers & Jansen, 2016) and other
measures of emotional eating, such as an emotion induction combined
with a taste test, should be considered in future studies. Furthermore,
other aspects such as biological rhythm and menstrual cycle can influ­
ence the processing of emotions on one hand (e.g. Armbruster, Grage,
Kirschbaum, & Strobel, 2018; Chayo, Fernandez, Sandor, & Tartar,
2017) and food intake on the other hand (e.g. Buffenstein, Poppitt,
McDevitt, & Prenteice, 1995; Gong, Garrel, & Calloway, 1989). Addi­
tional factors which might influence results regarding emotional pro­
cessing and/or response inhibition are smoking status (e.g. Dinur-Klein
et al., 2014; Oliver, Jentink, Drobes, & Evans, 2016), and consumption
of any substances (i.e. nicotine, alcohol, other drugs) prior to the
investigation. Therefore, future studies should control for substance
consumption, time of the day and for menstrual cycle when assessing
emotional eating, food intake, emotional processing or response
inhibition.
Another limitation of the current study and generally of the scientific
literature published regarding emotional eating is that most studies
investigated emotional eating only in female samples. This is certainly
due to the fact that eating disorders a more often found in females than
in males (e.g. Allen, Byrne, Oddy, & Crosby, 2013) and emotional eating
scores in the general population are higher for women than for men
(Nagl et al., 2016), which was also the reason to recruit a female sample
in our current pilot study. However, future research should also focus on
eating habits and emotional eating in men and investigate
gender-related similarities and differences.
Overall, this study presents preliminary evidence for an increased
neural reactivity to arousing negative scenes related to emotional eating.
Higher emotional eating scores were not related to higher scores in
1
We would like to thank one of the reviewers of this paper for proposing to
analyse frontal midline theta power in addition to N2/P3 peak amplitudes as a
neural measure of inhibitory control. We added these exploratory analyses into
our supplementary material, they mirror the results found for N2/P3 peak
amplitudes regarding effects of emotional condition and emotional eating on
inhibitory control (see Supplementary material, section 3).
I. Wolz et al.
habitual use of emotion suppression. No evidence was found supporting
the hypothesis that emotional eating tendencies are related to generally
lower inhibitory control capacities, but results showed preliminary ev­
idence for an association between emotional eating and problems to
inhibit behavioral responses specifically while trying to suppress nega­
tive emotions. Due to the pilot character of the study at hand, results
should be replicated in larger samples including extreme values of
emotional eating and alternative assessment methods for emotional
eating and emotion regulation.
Author contributions
IW, SB and JS contributed to the conception and design of the work
and to the data analysis, interpretation and drafting of the article. IW
and SB conducted and managed data collection. All authors approved
the final version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Ethical statement
The study was performed according to the Declaration of Helsinki
and approved by the ethics committee of the Psychology Department of
the University of Tübingen (ethics approval number:2017_0831_79).
Participants were required to give informed consent before their
participation, participation in the study was voluntary, privacy rights of
subjects and data protection were warranted.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the involved student assistants and master’s
students for their help during the data acquisition process. No financial
support was received for this study.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105142.
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