Chapter 4 94 Table 4 | Subgroups of future users sorted by type of awareness, combined with potential interventions of the virtual coach Strengths and limitations of the current study The vignette methodology worked well to present participants with real-life personas and situations they could identify with. We tested this by asking participants whether they could relate to the presented real-life personas. The recognisability of the content in their own daily life created a safe and valid environment to reflect on the stories. Participants were representative of a clinical sample of people with elevated levels of emotional eating, therefore the results have external validity and the interpretations could be implemented more directly into virtual coaching practices of people with emotional eating. A limitation of the study was that the participants were all women, which implies that the results can only be applied and generalized to female clients of virtual coaching. Future research This study provided us with information on how coaching should be designed for female adults with emotional eating. Future studies would need to clarify how to design the coach’s support facilities in order to serve different types of users depending on their level of knowledge and awareness of emotions and emotion regulation skills. Subgroups of users Possible intervention “when experiencing cravings” Possible intervention “after emotional eating” 1. Is unaware of emotions Gaining insight into emotions and the process: how to stop automatic behavior; monitoring emotions and analyzing the cause-and-effect chain with the emo.analyzer [50] A new view on “wrong eating behavior”: restoring the emotional eater’s relationship with food 2. Is aware of presence of emotions but unaware of need for emotionregulation Preventing recurrence: relaxation (how to release the emotion; distraction); replacing eating with other activities Coaching strategies: adjusting one’s self-image; validating emotions 3. Is aware of emotions and of need for emotionregulation Regulating emotions: learning to endure distress; nudging to think again Expelling pessimism: cognitive restructuring; fighting pessimism and negativity bias.
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