Study Sheds Light on the Role of Emotional Stress in Disordered Eating

The findings of a recent undergraduate experiment at Bucknell University suggest that eating disorders serve as a way for individuals to focus their emotional stress into concrete, food-suppressing behavior. An enterprising undergrad and assistant linguistics professor recently conducted an experiment to figure out what’s going on in the minds of people suffering with eating disorders. According to co-experimenter Lauren Feldman, “Much of the research on eating disorders looks at weight, food and body shape as motivators. But there’s also a theory that eating disorders serve emotional functions rather than physical ones.” So Feldman and fellow researcher Heidi Lorimor employed some good old-fashioned word association, hypothesizing that, burdened with a certain amount of stress, people suffering from eating disorders would react differently than non-stressed subjects to any mention of food or food-related words such as “starve” or “restaurant,” which would lay bare the emotional component of eating disorder thoughts.