Media\u27s Representation of Emotional Eating: A Content Analysis of Emotional Eating in Chick Flicks

With the goal of understanding the role that the media plays in influencing women to use food as a tool to cope with emotions, this project examines the presence of emotional eating (EE) in “chick flick” movies. Using social cognitive theory (SCT) as a framework, a sample of 50 top-grossing chick flicks from 1995 to 2015 were analyzed by two student coders for occurrences of EE and the discrete negative or positive emotions linked to the events in the movies. Coding revealed that 32 scenes in 22 of the movies (44%) showed instances of emotional eating, with sadness being the most prevalent emotional trigger. The main female characters who engaged in emotional eating were depicted as predominantly slim and attractive and half of all emotional eating events were connected to rewarded behaviors. The findings support the notion that emotional eating is a prevalent behavior in movies made for female audiences and lay the conceptual and empirical groundwork for future research testing the effects of exposure to these types of scenes on women’s health and emotional coping tactics. Keywords: emotional eating (EE), content analysis, social cognitive theory (SCT), chick flick