Sociocultural considerations in food addiction and emotional eating: comparative evidence from college students in the United States and South Korea.

Résumé

Food addiction and emotional eating are two eating-related constructs that have been linked to obesity and poor mental health, but the extent to which they reliably co-occur across different cultural contexts is less clear. Given that sociocultural norms and food environments differ between countries, this study examined whether food addiction and emotional eating are associated in undergraduate samples from the United States ( = 110) and South Korea ( = 141), and whether scores differ across key demographic subgroups within each country. Using a cross-sectional design, food addiction was assessed with the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 (YFAS 2.0), and emotional eating was assessed with the Emotional Eating Scale-II (EES-II). Consistent with the study's central hypothesis, food addiction and emotional eating were strongly and positively correlated in both samples (South Korea  = 0.74; United States  = 0.53; both