Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Eating Disorders Develop and Persist?
Name the reference point and time window behind each emotional comparison.
Why you’re reading it. Learn why different analyses can give apparently conflicting answers to an emotion-regulation account.
A question to consider. Draw a possible emotional trajectory that fits a worse post-episode level and a later decline. What causal question would still be unanswered?
Why this reading
Whether an emotion is higher after an event and whether it is falling over time are different questions. Borm and colleagues synthesize momentary assessments around binge-eating episodes. Their comparison of emotional levels and trajectories shows why the apparent answer to a theory can depend on the time scale and contrast used to test it.
Before you read
Ecological momentary assessment repeatedly samples experiences in daily life. Negative affect refers to unpleasant emotional states. A level comparison contrasts selected observations; a trajectory estimates change across a period. Neither temporal ordering nor frequent measurement alone establishes causation.
Read for
- Identify the comparison behind each result: ordinary eating, a person’s average, observations around an episode, or change over several hours.
- Ask how timing, episode definitions and dependence among effects influence what can be combined.
- Compare what the findings imply for anticipation, immediate experience and later emotional change. Are all of these equally well observed?
Consider afterwards
- How could emotion be worse immediately after an episode than before it, yet decrease over the subsequent period?
- What comparison would help distinguish an emotional change caused by an episode from a change that would have occurred anyway?
Editorial context
The synthesis covers 59 reports from 42 studies. Its level and trajectory results should not be collapsed into a simple verdict that binge eating either improves or worsens emotion. The evidence is observational, heterogeneous and concentrated in predominantly White female samples. Within-episode experience and rapid nonlinear changes are less well captured. A temporal association is not proof that emotion caused an episode or that the episode regulated it.