Nonverbal emotions and childhood obesity - Etiology of Obesity - Author Abstract

Nutrition Research Newsletter, May, 2003

Previous research has suggested a mother who uses food as a tool to handle any kind of distress in her infant, may play a role in the development of obesity in that child. This generally occurs because the mother is unable to distinguish between nonverbal emotional manifestations and the child's real need for food. In turn, the child may then develop an inability to distinguish between the need to eat and other needs, leading to a reduced capacity to discriminate emotional feelings and eat only when truly hungry. The term alexithymia has been used to describe the lack of ability to express and recognize emotions. It is thought that alexithymia may contribute to the obesity epidemic.

Italian researchers designed a study to further investigate this emotional deficit by using video clips as stimuli, which allows the evaluation of the ability to recognize nonverbal expressions of emotion in both the visual component and the voice expression component. Specifically, the mission of the study was to 1) replicate previous findings that show a reduced ability to recognize visual expressions of emotion in children suffering from severe obesity and in their mothers 2) evaluate if this deficit is present in paralinguistic channels; and 3) evaluate how the intensity of the expression of emotions or the facilitation of the task, because of the simultaneous presence of visual and vocal cues, affects the performances.

The investigation was performed using 21 obese children (10 males and 11 females) with percentage of weight excess (WE) e" 40 and an average age of 10.7 years, range 8.3 to 13.8 years. Twenty-one normal or moderately overweight children and their mothers were used as the comparison group. Thirty-two short films, using four professional actors, were used. The films expressed four primary emotions (anger, sadness, fear, and happiness) with two intensity levels: low and high, so that there were eight emotional expressions, each in four different sequences. Prior to taping the films, actors were asked to express emotions with face, gestures, body movements and posture, and to pronounce two sentences with corresponding timbre, tone, and rhythm.

Both the mother and the child were then shown the 32 film sequence. The clips were presented three times in three different ways of presentation (visual only, sound only, visual and sound together) for a total of 96 presentations. Each subject was asked to underline the recognized emotion on an answer sheet.

All mothers, regardless of whether they belonged to the obese or control group, had a greater ability to decode the emotional expressions in comparison with the children. Both the obese boys and the obese girls and their mothers demonstrated a reduced ability to decode visual and verbal signs of emotion when compared to the control group.

The results of this investigation are in accordance with the alexithymia construct, and suggest the importance of developing therapeutic strategies to combat the alexithymic characteristics in obese children and their mothers.

B. Baldaro, N. Rossi, R. Caterina, et al. Deficit in the discrimination of nonverbal emotions in children with obesity and their mothers. International Journal of Obesity;27: 191-195 (March, 2003). [Correspondence: B Baldaro, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy. E-mail: baldaro@psibo.unibo.it].