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Objectives Stress and emotions alter eating behavior in several ways: While experiencing negative or positive emotions typically leads to increased food intake, stress may result in either over- or undereating. Several participant characteristics, like gender, BMI and restrained, emotional, or external eating styles seem to influence these relationships. Thus far, most research relied on experimental laboratory studies, thereby reducing the complexity of real-life eating episodes. The aim of the present study was to delineate the effects of stress, negative and positive emotions on two key facets of eating behavior, namely taste- and hunger-based eating, in daily life using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Furthermore, the already mentioned individual differences as well as time pressure during eating, an important but unstudied construct in EMA studies, were examined. Methods Fifty-nine participants completed 10 days of signal-contingent sampling and data were analyzed using multilevel modeling. Results Results revealed that higher stress led to decreased taste-eating which is in line with physiological stress-models. Time pressure during eating resulted in less taste- and more hunger-eating. In line with previous research, stronger positive emotions went along with increased taste-eating. Emotional eating style moderated the relationship between negative emotions and taste-eating as well as hunger-eating. BMI moderated the relationship between negative as well as positive emotions and hunger-eating. Conclusions These findings emphasize the importance of individual differences for understanding eating behavior in daily life. Experienced time pressure may be an important aspect for future EMA eating studies.

Sex differences in emotional reactivity have been studied primarily for negative but less so for positive stimuli; likewise, sex differences in the psychophysiological response-patterning during such stimuli are poorly understood. Thus, the present study examined sex differences in response to negative/positive and high/low arousing films (classified as threat-, loss-, achievement-, and recreation-related, vs. neutral films), while measuring 18 muscular, autonomic, and respiratory parameters. Sex differences emerged for all films, but were most prominent for threat-related films: Despite equivalent valence and arousal ratings, women displayed more facial-muscular and respiratory responding than men and pronounced sympathetic activation (preejection period, other cardiovascular and electrodermal measures), while men showed coactivated sympathetic/parasympathetic responding (including increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia). This indicates a prototypical threat-related defense response in women, while men showed a pattern of sustained orienting, which can be understood as a shift toward less threat proximity in the defense cascade model. Clinical implications are discussed within a socio-evolutionary framework.

Engaging in social interaction often implies being evaluated. Receiving positive evaluations from others may elicit affiliative emotions whereas negative evaluations are likely to trigger withdrawal and defensive social behavior. Evolution has equipped humans with efficient systems to detect, appraise, and regulate responses to such evaluative communications and to express complementary responses. The current study investigates neural, facial-muscular, and experiential responses to short videos delivering neutral, positive, and negative audiovisual messages as well as their relation to individual differences in social anxiety. Fifty-eight participants (32 female) watched 90 videos with male and female actors displaying positive, negative, and neutral statements. Experientially, ratings of valence and arousal showed the expected category differences. Neurally, larger centro-parietal late positive event related potentials were found for emotional (positive and negative) videos compared to neutral videos. Facial electromyography revealed reduced corrugator muscle and increased zygomaticus major muscle activity for positive videos compared to neutral and negative videos. Cognitive components of social anxiety were related to a more unpleasant experience of negative videos and a less pleasant experience of positive videos. Thus, a set of neural, facial-muscular, and experiential responses contribute to social interaction in the context of relatively naturalistic social-evaluative stimuli.

Objective The current study examined neural and behavioral responses to angry, happy and neutral faces in childhood social anxiety disorder (SAD). Method Behavioral (reaction time and accuracy) and electrocortical measures (P100, N170, EPN, LPP) were assessed during a facial emotion identification task in children (age 10–13) with SAD ( n = 32), clinical controls with mixed anxiety disorders ( n = 30), and healthy controls ( n = 33). Results Overall, there were no group differences in behavioral or neural responses to emotional faces. However, children with SAD showed an attenuated LPP to male relative to female faces, while the opposite pattern emerged in the other two groups. Discussion Stimulus gender, but not facial emotion drove group-specific effects, which became evident in later, more elaborate stages of attention processing. The present study provides preliminary indications of gender effects in childhood SAD which should be further investigated by future studies.

Social anxiety is associated with an attentional bias toward angry and fearful faces, along with an enhanced processing of faces per se. However, little is known about the processing of gaze direction, a subtle but important social cue. Participants with high or low social anxiety (HSA/LSA) observed eye pairs with direct or averted gaze while subjective ratings and event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured. Behaviorally, all participants rated averted gaze as more unpleasant than direct gaze. Neurally, only HSA participants showed a trend for higher P100 amplitudes to averted gaze and significantly enhanced processing at late latencies (Late positive potential [LPP]), indicative of a specific processing bias for averted gaze. Furthermore, HSA individuals showed enhanced processing of both direct and averted gaze relative to the LSA group at intermediate latencies (Early posterior negativity [EPN]). Both general and specific attentional biases play a role in social anxiety. Averted gaze--potential sign of disinterest--deserves more attention in the attentional bias literature.

Inhalation of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) enriched air triggers anxiety in panic disorder (PD) patients, which is often interpreted as a sign of biological vulnerability. However, most studies have not measured respiration in these tasks. We compared patients with PD ( n = 20) and social phobia (SP, n = 19) to healthy controls ( n = 18) during eight inhalations of 20% CO 2 , preceded and followed by two inhalations of room air, while continuously measuring subjective anxiety and dyspnea as well as autonomic and respiratory variables. PD patients showed increased reactivity and delayed recovery during CO 2 inhalations for most measures. Unlike both other groups, the PD group's tidal volume responses did not habituate across CO 2 inhalations. However, PD patients did not differ from SP patients on most other measures, supporting a continuum model of CO 2 sensitivity across anxiety disorders. Both patient groups showed continued reactivity during the last air inhalations, which is unlikely to be due to a biological sensitivity.

Highlights • Cardiac vagal control (CVC) was measured during an extended standardized baseline. • Subjective and polysomnographic variables of sleep quality were assessed. • Higher CVC was found to be associated with better subjective and objective sleep quality., Cardiac vagal control (CVC) has been linked to both physical and mental health. One critical aspect of health, that has not received much attention, is sleep. We hypothesized that adults with higher CVC – operationalized by high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) – will exhibit better sleep quality assessed both subjectively (i.e., with Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) and objectively (i.e., with polysomnography). HF-HRV was measured in 29 healthy young women during an extended neutral film clip. Participants then underwent full polysomnography to obtain objective measures of sleep quality and HF-HRV during a night of sleep. As expected, higher resting HF-HRV was associated with higher subjective and objective sleep quality (i.e., shorter sleep latency and fewer arousals). HF-HRV during sleep (overall or separated by sleep phases) showed less consistent relationships with sleep quality. These findings indicate that high waking CVC may be a key predictor of healthy sleep.

Emotional eating, a trait-like style of food intake in response to negative emotion states, represents an important aspect of overeating and eating related psychopathology. The mechanisms of emotional eating both on experiential and neuronal levels are not well delineated. We recorded event related potentials (ERPs) while individuals with high or low emotional eating style (HEE, n = 25; LEE, n = 20) viewed and rated pictures of high-caloric food during neutral state vs. negative idiosyncratic emotion induction. Craving ratings increased in HEE and decreased in LEE during negative relative to neutral states. ERPs to food pictures showed an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) over parieto-occipital regions for HEE compared to LEE. Emotional state modulated food picture evoked ERPs over right frontal regions in HEE only. This suggests that appetitive food processing is susceptible to both concurrent emotion and habitual eating style which is of relevance for overeating in healthy and abnormal eating.

Distraction and reappraisal are two widely used forms of emotion regulation. The process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998) holds that they differ (1) in when they act on the emotion-generative process, and (2) in their impact on subsequent responses to regulated stimuli. We tested these two predictions by measuring electrocortical responses to neutral and emotional images during two phases. In the regulation phase, images were watched or regulated using distraction or reappraisal. During the re-exposure phase, the same images were passively watched. As predicted, during regulation, distraction reduced the late positive potential (LPP) earlier than reappraisal. Upon re-exposure, images with a distraction (but not reappraisal) history elicited a larger LPP than images with an attend history. This pattern of results suggests that distraction and reappraisal intervene at separate stages during emotion generation, a feature which may have distinct consequences that extend beyond the regulatory episode.

Twenty-five panic disorder (PD) patients, 19 social phobics (SP), and 20 healthy controls (HC) sat quietly for 15 minutes, rating their anxiety and dyspnea every 30 seconds while respiratory, cardiovascular, and electrodermal responses were recorded. No panic attacks were reported. For self-reported anxiety and dyspnea, within-subject variability over time was higher in PD than in SP or HC. In PD within-subject correlations across 30-second epochs were significant for (a) self-reported anxiety versus dyspnea, end-tidal pCO2, minute volume, duty cycle, skin conductance level, and interbeat interval, and for (b) dyspnea versus end-tidal pCO2, minute volume, tidal volume, and inspiratory flow rate. Several positive or negative correlations were greater in PD than in other groups. Thus in PD, experienced anxiety and dyspnea are temporally unstable but are correlated with each other and with fluctuations in respiratory and autonomic variables, even in the absence of panic attacks.

Inhalation of carbon-dioxide (CO2) enriched air triggers anxiety in panic disorder (PD) patients, which is often interpreted as a sign of biological vulnerability. However, most studies have not measured respiration in these tasks. We compared patients with PD (N=20) and social phobia (SP, N=19) to healthy controls (N=18) during eight inhalations of 20% CO2, preceded and followed by two inhalations of room air, while continuously measuring subjective anxiety and dyspnea as well as autonomic and respiratory variables. PD patients showed increased reactivity and delayed recovery during CO2 inhalations for most measures. Unlike both other groups, the PD group’s tidal volume responses did not habituate across CO2 inhalations. However, PD patients did not differ from SP patients on most other measures, supporting a continuum model of CO2 sensitivity across anxiety disorders. Both patient groups showed continued reactivity during the last air inhalations, which is unlikely to be due to a biological sensitivity.