Neurotic Eating Tied to Emotional Nuttiness: Hello Hollywood.

Just adding to the bunch of studies that show how your eating affects your thinking and emotional health.

With a constant focus on thinness, garbage diet food products and a "less is more" default thinking when it comes to eating in the Western society; no wonder we are seeing a rise in neurotic behaviors and a general lack of people skills/compassion in society that manifest in a variety of ways. So perhaps we should begin consider exchanging marriage counseling for diet counseling: it is not uncommon that my clients report improved social relationships once their nutritional needs are met and matched to their genetic blueprint - which is not really surprising, since we need our basic needs met (cf. Maslow's hierarchy of needs), before we can evolve and connect to other people in a balanced manner and form healthy bonds that are not linked to abusive disorders or emotional dysregulation, simply due to not having mastered the art of feeding ourselves properly.

A new study shows that women with abnormal eating behaviors, such as binging or extreme fear of gaining weight, misinterpreted facial expressions in others, especially anger and fear, compared with a control group, researchers report in the journal Appetite. Women with abnormal eating behaviors mistook fear, bottom right, for anger, left, and sadness, top right, in a series of images of emotions, including happiness, top left.

Abnormal eating is associated with poor social skills and an impaired ability to recognize facial emotions. This study is the first to identify a pattern in recognition errors, researchers said.



Reference: 
Appetite. 2012 Aug;59(1):181-6. Epub 2012 Apr 24.
The influence of emotional intensity on facial emotion recognition in disordered eating.
Ridout N, Wallis DJ, Autwal Y, Sellis J.