Chapter 4 92 of participants were well aware of their inability to deal adequately with their emotions and assuage them. Knowing that eating is their coping strategy to handle negative emotions, participants expressed a wish to learn how to deal with emotional distress. They were in need for instructions and tools to regulate agitation, stress and anger. When negative affect is experienced and people regulate it maladaptively, this inadequate emotion-regulation strategy can be responsible for increased eating [84-85]. Literature shows that there is a link between being able to regulate one’s emotions and level of emotional awareness [86]. Emotional awareness seems to be a requisite for a person’s emotion regulation skills [87]. A potential task for the virtual coach would be to fulfil these requirements by providing information and exercises on regulation of emotions. Expelling pessimism A majority of participants saw themselves as unable to break through fixed patterns without help. They expressed the need for exercises that would help improve their basic attitude and bring about behavioural change. The results of this study are in accordance with previous findings. People with emotional eating seem to be pessimistic and have a negativity bias [88]. Not only is their thinking distorted, but by overestimating the chances of bad things happening to them [89] they also tend to disqualify the positive and instead have negative emotions and thoughts [90]. Szczygieł’s study shows that the potentially damaging impact of negative emotions on the processing of emotional information can be prevented by high emotional awareness or by implementing reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy [91]. Further, poor self-control is related to emotional eating induced by negative emotions [92-93]. Together with the negativity bias, there is a reasonable likelihood that people with emotional eating might relapse, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The virtual coach could provide users exercises from cognitive restructuring to learn to accumulate positive experiences in life [94] or offer positive reappraisal [95]. Coaching strategies Participants displayed poor self-image. It has been described in the literature that people with emotional eating are hard on themselves. They have a negative body image, [9699] articulated by body hate – negative expressions about their own body and body parts. Individuals with alexithymia score higher in body dissatisfaction and have lower self-esteem [100]. After an emotional eating episode, people may be overwhelmed with feelings of disgust and low self-esteem [76].
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