Emotional Distress Regulation Takes Precedence Over Impulse Control: If ...

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2001, Vol. 80, No. 1, 53-67

Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/01/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.80.1.53

Emotional Distress Regulation Takes Precedence Over Impulse Control: If You Feel Bad, Do It!

Dianne M. Tice, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Roy F. Baumeister

Case Western Reserve University

Why do people's impulse controls break down during emotional distress? Some theories propose that distress impairs one's motivation or one's ability to exert self-control, and some postulate self-destructive intentions arising from the moods. Contrary to those theories, Three experiments found that believing that one's bad mood was frozen (unchangeable) eliminated the tendency to eat fattening snacks (Experiment 1), seek immediate gratification (Experiment 2), and engage in frivolous procrastination (Experiment 3). The implication is that when people are upset, they indulge immediate impulses to make themselves feel better, which amounts to giving short-term affect regulation priority over other self-regulatory goals.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is the victory over self.

--Aristotle

Everything that feels good is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. --Unknown

The ability to control and regulate impulses, emotions, desires, performances, and other behaviors is one of the core features of the self. Given the adaptive benefits of being able to manage inner states and alter one's own behavioral responses, self-regulation is also vitally important for achieving success and happiness in life. Deficiencies and failures in impulse control have been linked to a broad spectrum of personal and social problems, including addiction and substance abuse, crime, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, school failure, debt and bankruptcy, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, and obesity (see Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994, for a review).

Some self-regulation failures may occur because different regulatory goals are in conflict. The present investigation was concerned with one particular type of conflict, namely, between affect regulation and impulse control. In general, impulse control requires the person to stifle the quest for short-term, often pleasurable rewards so as to pursue distal goals. To achieve the optimal long-term outcomes, people must avoid responding only to the immediate stimulus environment so that they can pursue long-term strategies that produce significant (but delayed) benefits. In fact, one might plausibly speculate that the reason the human capacity

Dianne M. Tice, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Roy F. Baumeister, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University.

We gratefully acknowledge support of Grant MH-57039 from the National Institutes of Health.

We thank Craig Frederick for programming the computer game for Experiment 2.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Roy F. Baumeister, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106. Electronic mail may be sent to rfb2@po.cwru.edu.

for self-regulation evolved was to enable human beings to resist immediate impulses and pursue long-term goals.

Impulse control and optimal self-regulation may thus require a long-range focus on distal goals. Emotional distress, however, may shift priorities toward the immediate present. When people feel acutely bad, they generally wish to feel better, and this wish is often urgent. The promise of feeling better in 1 or 2 years is probably too remote to console most people who are acutely upset here and now. Emotional distress may therefore work against the usual pattern of impulse control because distress promotes a shortterm focus, whereas impulse control requires a long-term one.

The conflict is further exacerbated by the promise of immediate pleasure that many impulsive behaviors may carry. Indeed, successful self-regulation in the service of long-term goals often depends on foregoing immediate pleasures. Meanwhile, a presentoriented desire to escape from emotional distress probably enhances the search for immediate sources of good feelings. Many of the common foci of self-regulatory restraints are activities that hold some promise of immediate pleasure: alcohol, drugs, highcalorie foods, illicit sex, extra sleep, expensive purchases, timewasting games, and other entertainments.

Thus, there is a special antipathy between affect regulation and other spheres of self-control. When under emotional distress, people may give priority to the short-term goal of feeling better and in the process may sacrifice long-range goals such as slimness, sobriety, and thrift. The tendency to give priority to affect regulation is therefore detrimental to behavioral self-control and can be costly in the long run. In other words, affect regulation may win out over impulse control when people are emotionally upset.

Thus, the central idea of this investigation was that impulse control may fail because emotionally distraught people give primacy to affect regulation. To test this idea, we adapted the moodfreezing procedure developed by Manucia, Baumann, and Cialdini (1984), which looks for behavioral change as a function of whether affect regulation is ostensibly possible or impossible. Behaviors that are found only when affect regulation is possible are inferred to be motivated (at least in part) by the desire for affective benefit. In Study 2, we also considered individual differences in mood regulation proclivities by using the scale developed by Catanzaro and Mearns (1990, 1999). In Study 3, we varied the affective

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appeal of distractor tasks that would compete with the main assigned task. To increase the generality of our results for the broad range of impulse control processes, we examined impulse control in the different spheres of eating (Study 1), delay of gratification (Study 2; Knapp & Clark, 1991), and procrastination (Study 3).

Emotional Distress and Regulatory Failure

Ample evidence has indicated that self-regulation (especially impulse control) tends to deteriorate during periods of emotional distress. Here, we briefly review some of the major evidence to substantiate the effects of emotion on self-control across multiple spheres of control.

Eating is one important sphere in which bad moods lead to regulatory failure. Overweight people are more likely to report excessive eating when they are anxious or depressed (Logue, 1993). Inducing a bad mood in dieters has been shown to lead to increases in eating (Greeno & Wing, 1994). Likewise, induced anxiety causes obese people to increase their consumption of food (Slochower & Kaplan, 1980). In many cases, a reciprocal pattern of escalating or spiraling effects develops, in which distress causes eating, which leads to more distress as the person reflects on his or her dietary breakdown, which in turn triggers more eating (Heatherton & Polivy, 1992). The existence of multiple links or mechanisms that connect distress to eating is suggested by different patterns, such as the fact that ego threats and physical dangers affect dieters differently, but in general, restrained eating tends to be undermined by aversive emotional states (Heatherton, Herman, & Polivy, 1991; Heatherton, Striepe, & Wittenberg, 1998).

Likewise, emotional distress causes people to fail in their efforts at smoking cessation (Brownell, Marlatt, Lichtenstein, & Wilson, 1986), and in general, smoking increases when people are distressed or upset (Ashton & Stepney, 1982). Laboratory inductions of anxiety lead to an increase in smoking (Schachter et al., 1977). During stressful situations, smokers feel better if they smoke (Gilbert & Spielberger, 1987; Nesbitt, 1973).

Distress also contributes to drinking. Alcohol is widely believed (by the general public) to reduce anxiety and improve mood (Sayette, 1993; Stockwell, 1985). These beliefs have some justification with moderate doses, but heavy doses actually contribute to more negative moods (Nathan, Titler, Lowenstein, Solomon, & Rossi, 1970; Stockwell, 1985). Efforts to quit drinking, such as during alcohol recovery, are sometimes successful to the extent that negative emotions can be avoided, but emotional distress tends to undermine and thwart the program of abstention (Hull, Young, & Jouriles, 1986; Pickens, Hatsukami, Spicer, & Svikis, 1985). Many people can apparently successfully manage to stay on the wagon during good times but relapse into serious drinking when personal problems and distress arise.

Gambling and compulsive shopping have been less extensively studied, but self-control of such behaviors likewise appears to fail during emotional distress (O'Guinn & Faber, 1987; Peck, 1986). People believe that gambling or shopping will make them feel better (Dickerson, 1991; Faber, 1992; Rook, 1987).

Aggression and violence are also influenced by self-control, and indeed Baumeister (1997b) concluded that the proximal cause of much violence is a breakdown of the internal restraints that normally keep people from acting on their angry impulses. Gottfred-

son and Hirschi (1990) proposed that low self-control is the most important factor in building a general theory of crime and criminality. Berkowitz (1989) proposed that all forms of negative affect contribute to increased aggression (i.e., not just frustration, as some previous views have held). If that view is correct, then many acts of aggression may well reflect the loss of self-control under the influence of emotional distress.

Finally, the capacity to delay gratification has long been one of the prototypes of self-control, insofar as it requires people to resist impulses and facilitates the enlightened pursuit of long-term selfinterest (e.g., Mischel, 1996). The capacity to delay gratification is likewise vulnerable to emotional distress, however. Thinking about unhappy events leads to subsequent self-gratification and self-indulgence, as compared with thinking about neutral events (Mischel, Coates, & Raskoff, 1968; Schwartz & Pollack, 1977). Children who were instructed to reminisce about a sad event were subsequently less able to resist the temptation to play with a forbidden toy than were children who reminisced about a happy event (Fry, 1975). More generally, when people face a choice between immediate small rewards and larger but delayed rewards, emotional distress causes people to shift toward the former (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1973; Underwood, Moore, & Rosenhan, 1973; Wertheim & Schwartz, 1983).

Why Does Distress Impair Regulation?

From the evidence presented in the preceding section, it appears to be well established that self-control breaks down when one is under emotional distress. In fact, the pervasiveness of the link between emotional distress and self-control failure suggests that the question is not whether but how negative affect produces these effects. It is very likely that there is more than one theoretical mechanism that answers this question. Several major theories have been proposed about why emotional distress impairs regulation.

Intentional Self-Destruction

One theory is based on psychodynamic theory and holds that some forms of emotional distress give rise to self-destructive tendencies. According to Piers and Singer (1953/1971), for example, guilt makes people desire to suffer or to be punished. A person who feels distress may therefore abandon the positive pursuit of desirable goals and even the normal conduct of healthy, adaptive behaviors because the aversive state generates self-defeating motivations.

Capacity

A second line of theory would predict that emotional distress prevents rational thought and therefore undermines the capacity to effectively regulate oneself. According to this view, people who are emotionally upset cease to function as rational, goal-oriented beings, and as a result, they become unable to regulate their behavior toward the pursuit of positive outcomes and goals. Variations on this hypothesis suggest that the emotionally distraught person may become impulsive, risk-oriented, arbitrary, or preoccupied. Leith and Baumeister (1996) found that some forms of emotional distress, especially those marked by high arousal, caused people to fail to think through the implications of their

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actions, resulting in risky and potentially self-defeating actions. In contrast, low-arousal forms of emotional distress, such as sadness, have been found to produce more extensive processing of information (Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994), and these forms of emotional distress might conceivably impair self-regulation if the processing of incoming information precluded attending to longrange goals.

The view that emotional distress impairs the capacity for effective self-regulation could also be phrased in terms of limited regulatory resources. Our own research has suggested that people's capacity for self-regulation depends on a limited resource akin to strength or energy (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998). In this view, people who are upset may expend their precious resources struggling with their feelings, and the resulting depletion of regulatory resources would leave them unable to regulate their behavior in other ways that would be more beneficial and constructive in the long run.

Motivation

Yet another line of theory suggests that emotional distress may impair the motivation (as opposed to the capacity) to regulate oneself in the normal, optimal fashion. This approach can be subdivided into apathy, rebellion, and self-efficacy hypotheses. The apathy version proposes that the person who is upset may simply cease to care about pursuing positive, desirable options and therefore becomes willing to contravene his or her own normal patterns of goal pursuit and healthy, constructive behavior. This approach differs from the previous theories because the distraught person is presumably still capable of effective self-regulation and does not have any explicit self-destructive impulses. The person simply no longer cares enough to put forth the exertion to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, the rebellion version would suggest that at least some forms of emotional distress cause the person to rebel against the seeming constraints of normal, proper behavior, and so the person may willfully engage in behaviors that thwart his or her normal behavioral regulation patterns. The self-efficacy version would propose that feeling upset would make the person feel incapable of successfully guiding behavior toward the realization of distal goals, and so the person would give up on them and concentrate on immediate gratification (see Bandura, 1977; Bandura & Schunk, 1981).

Priority Shift

Thus, the majority of theories about how distress impairs selfregulation emphasize impairment (of either capacity or motivation). The present investigation was spurred by the view that the effects on self-regulation may be strategic. Specifically, we propose that people may abandon or violate their normal selfregulatory efforts because they give priority to affect regulation over other forms of self-regulation. In plain terms, distress makes the quest for pleasure take precedence over impulse control.

Our reasoning was based on the assumption that affect regulation is not simply another sphere of self-control but in some sense a special case. The crux of this specialness is that impulse control

typically entails resisting one's desire for something that is expected to make the self feel good. Emotional distress intensifies the motivation to feel better, and so it may increase the subjective intensity or urgency of hedonistic desires and impulses. After all, an indulgence that might yield a pleasant state may be safely resisted if one already feels good: Yielding to temptation would produce only a small gain in affective state, as compared with how one feels now. In contrast, if one feels acutely bad--which is the essence of emotional distress--then the appeal of that very same pleasant state may be greatly enhanced because feeling that good would be a very welcome change from one's current state. In such an analysis, it seems eminently rational for a distressed person to yield to temptation.

The rationality is compromised, however, if one considers potential long-term costs of yielding to temptation. In the short run, people may indeed enjoy some escape from emotional distress by means of taking drugs or alcohol, committing sexual indiscretions, or gambling large sums of money. These temporary gains may, however, be outweighed by eventual outcomes such as addiction, arrest, marital breakup, sexually transmitted diseases, or financial ruin. The pursuit of short-term gains despite severe long-term risks and costs has been identified as a recurrent feature of selfdefeating behaviors (Baumeister, 1997a; Baumeister & Scher, 1988; Platt, 1973).

More broadly, it is plausible that the human capacity for selfcontrol evolved as adaptive precisely because it enabled people to resist immediate, proximal stimuli so as to pursue long-term benefits. The situational dilemma that forms the prototype of selfcontrol is whether to pursue some immediate option of pleasure or instead to seek some (possibly delayed) benefit that requires sacrificing the proffered pleasure. People can easily make themselves forego options that offer them no pleasure or advantage. It is precisely the promise of immediate pleasure or gain that makes temptation difficult to resist. Thus, the successful pursuit of longterm goals depends on the ability to control and restrain impulses.

In a sense, people come to grief by giving undue priority to affect regulation. For example, a dieter may ordinarily be able to resist the pleasures of rich desserts or fried foods to pursue the long-term goals of fashionable slimness and good health. When that same dieter is emotionally upset, however, those long-term goals recede in importance, whereas the relatively urgent goal of feeling better enhances the temptation of the tasty but fattening foods. The person may be sorry months later when faced with the prospect of going out on a public beach in a skimpy swimsuit and revealing the excess cellulite to friends and gawkers. At the time, though, the immediate prospect of feeling better led to the indulgence.

In our analysis, then, emotional distress alters how people face the standard dilemma of whether to take immediate pleasure or to resist temptation in favor of long-term benefits. Our hypothesis was that distress shifts people toward favoring the immediate pleasure. Affect regulation (to relieve acute distress) overrides impulse control.

The Present Investigation

The present investigation was designed to show that impulse control fails because people give priority to affect regulation. It was necessary to show first that emotional distress impairs self-

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control. As we already noted, however, there is ample evidence of such a link. Hence, although we have included some effort to replicate that link, it was not a central goal of this research.

The more difficult challenge was to demonstrate that affect regulation (as opposed to other, more direct consequences of negative affect) mediates the link between emotional distress and failure at impulse control. In other words, is it really because people are trying to feel better that they abandon self-control when they are under the influence of negative affect?

A creative procedure for demonstrating the specific mediating role of affect regulation was developed by Manucia et al. (1984). In previous research, Cialdini and colleagues (e.g., Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973; Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976) had established that emotional distress led to increases in helping behavior. However, the previous research fell short of the goal of demonstrating that people helped precisely in order to feel better. Manucia et al. accomplished this demonstration with a bogus moodfreezing manipulation. In their procedure, participants were given placebo drugs and told that these drugs would have the side effect of making it impossible for them to change their mood or emotional state for an hour or so. This manipulation rendered affect regulation useless, and so it should have eliminated any behaviors that were done principally for the sake of affect regulation. Sure enough, Manucia et al. found that the mood-freezing manipulation eliminated the increase in helping by sad, depressed people. In other words, sad people helped only when they believed that giving help could improve their emotional state, and not otherwise. The implication is that they helped so as to change their mood.

We adapted the mood-freezing procedure to test our hypothesis about emotional distress and impulse control. If emotional distress simply impairs the ability to regulate one's behavior, then impulse control should be poor among distraught people regardless of the mood-freezing manipulation. In contrast, if the mood-freezing manipulation eliminates the link between emotional distress and impulse control failure, then it would be reasonable to conclude that impulse control fails because emotional distress makes people seek ways of feeling better.

Recent research on aggression has provided some encouraging findings with regard to the present hypothesis. In laboratory experiments, participants were put into bad moods and then given a mood-freezing pill, just as in the procedure developed by Manucia et al. (1984). Among people who believed in catharsis and venting, aggression was significantly reduced (Bushman, Baumeister, & Phillips, in press). Thus, some people may apparently become aggressive as a way of making themselves feel better, especially if they believe that venting their negative affect will produce a cathartic release and a subsequent improvement in their affective state. Because aggression is a complex pattern of behavior that is not always associated with self-control failure, however (cf. Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990), we felt it necessary to conduct studies using behaviors that are widely recognized as depending on selfcontrol. We selected eating fattening foods (Study 1), delay of gratification (Study 2), and procrastination (Study 3). In all three cases, we sought to show that emotional distress would impair impulse control and increase the behavior and (more important) that this increase would be eliminated among people whose moods were believed to be frozen in the aversive state.

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 was designed to show that eating fattening, unhealthy foods that taste good would occur as an affect regulation strategy. Prior research (reviewed in the introduction) has established that emotional distress causes people to lose some control over their eating, resulting in episodes that break diets or even border on pathological eating binges. In this study, we sought to show that those episodes of overeating may be mediated by the hope that eating will make the person feel better.

Our research design was based on the mood-freezing procedure of Manucia et al. (1984), in the sense of seeking to demonstrate that a particular response (in our case, eating) to negative affect would be eliminated if participants were led to believe that their moods would not change. Instead of giving participants a placebo pill and telling them that it would make their mood state impervious to change for a time, we used a simpler procedure of informing some participants that eating would not improve their moods. Control participants received no such instruction and thus presumably sustained the common belief that eating tasty, fattening food is an effective way to cheer up.

Our prediction was that the induced sad, distressed mood would lead to an increase in eating among participants in the control condition. In the mood-freeze condition, however, no such increase would be found.

Method

Participants. Seventy-four students (43 men and 31 women) in introductory psychology courses participated in individual sessions of 45 min each. They received credit toward course requirements for their participation. They were randomly assigned to mood-induction and mood-freeze conditions.

Procedure. The experimenter explained that the purpose of the study was to investigate how emotional intelligence was related to certain personality traits. Participants were told that they would be taking a test of their emotional intelligence and filling out several personality questionnaires. The experimenter explained to participants that the test involved reading a real-life scenario and imagining themselves to be the main character in it. Thus, they were asked to imagine themselves in a particular situation and to experience and identify with the emotions provoked by it.

After participants signed a consent form, they were asked to read one of two stories. These stories were adapted from Wenzlaff, Wegner, and Roper (1988). In the distress condition, the story depicted a driver who was in a hurry and therefore ran a red light, thereby causing an accident that resulted in the death of a child. In contrast, the protagonist in the story in the happy condition saved a child's life. Participants were asked to read aloud the assigned story with the experimenter in the room. Then they were instructed to read it again to themselves and to imagine themselves in the given situation (as the main character). They were told to think about the emotions they felt and to write a brief essay summarizing how they felt at the moment. The experimenter left the room during this phase to give the participants time to concentrate on the story and the essay.

Next, the experimenter explained that it was necessary to wait at least 15 min to allow the sensory memory of the scenario to fade. During that time the participants were asked to take part in an ostensibly unrelated pilot study on the differences among people in the perception and taste of various kinds of foods. The taste test was presented as if it was unrelated to the mood manipulations, but in fact, it was the main dependent measure.

All participants were asked to taste three kinds of foods: pretzels, chocolate chip cookies, and small cheese ("goldfish") crackers. They were instructed to taste each kind of food and fill out a questionnaire rating each

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food, and to this end, they were provided with bowls of food and rating forms.

The mood-freezing manipulation was introduced just before the experimenter left the room so the participants could conduct the taste test. In the mood-freeze condition, the experimenter said,

Even though people believe eating makes them feel better, scientific evidence points to the contrary. Eating does not make you feel better; if anything, it prolongs your current mood state for a period of time. Whatever mood you are in right now, you are very likely to stay in the same mood throughout the experiment.

Participants in the changeable mood (control) condition received no instructions about the effects of eating on mood.

After 10 min, the experimenter returned and asked the participants to fill out three additional questionnaires. The first was the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (Mayer & Gaschke, 1988), the second was the Dieting Restraint Scale (Herman & Polivy, 1975), and the third was a manipulation check. Then the experimenter debriefed, thanked, and dismissed the participants.

Results

Manipulation check. The mood induction was checked by an item asking participants how they felt after imagining themselves in their assigned scenario. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was significant variation among the four conditions, F(3, 70) = 136.45, p < .001. Participants in the two distress conditions (i.e., both mood freeze [M = 3.89] and changeable mood [M = 2.72]) reported feeling much sadder than participants in the happy conditions (Ms = 20.00 and 19.10, respectively).

Amount of food eaten. The quantity of snack food consumed by each participant constituted the main measure of (failed) impulse control. The pretzels, cookies, and crackers were counted by the experimenter (unbeknownst to the participant) before and after the taste test, and the amounts consumed by the participant were calculated by subtraction. These three measures were entered into a multivariate analysis of variance, which revealed significant variation among the conditions, F(3, 68) = 2.82, p < .05.

Probably the most appropriate measure was the total number of food morsels eaten. Because the three kinds of food differed in morsel size, and because the cheese cracker measure had high variance, we standardized within each food type and summed the three Z scores for each participant to create an index of total food eaten. The means are presented in Table 1. ANOVA performed on these totals yielded a significant interaction between induced mood state and changeability of mood, F(l, 70) = 5.83, p < .05, d = .56. Neither main effect was significant (Fs < 1). To test the specific prediction that distressed participants would eat more in the

Table 1 Total Amount of Snack Foods Eaten

Condition

Mood freeze

Changeable mood

Happy Distress

0.49(1.78) -0.89(1.62)

-0.35 (2.30) 0.79 (3.00)

Note. These numbers represent mean sums of standardized scores on amounts of cookies, pretzels, and cheese crackers. High positive scores indicate more eating. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

changeable mood condition than in the frozen mood condition, we computed a pairwise comparison, which revealed a significant difference consistent with the hypothesis, ?(34) = 2.09, p < .05, d = .72. Thus, people in an ostensibly frozen sad mood ate less than people in a sad but changeable mood.

Mood. Each of the two subscales on the Brief Mood Introspection Scale was subjected to ANOVA. The mood manipulation had a significant effect on the Valence subscale, F(\, 70) = 4.85, p < .05, indicating that people in the distress condition (M = 14.92) felt more negative than people in the happy condition (M = 20.53). No other effect was significant on this subscale. With regard to the Arousal subscale, no effects were significant.

To investigate any actual link between eating and final mood, we computed correlations between the total amount of food eaten and the Valence subscale score from the Brief Mood Introspection Scale. Across all conditions, the correlation was .13 (ns). In the distressed mood/changeable mood condition, the effect was also not significant (r = .12, ns). Thus, there was no significant evidence that eating more caused people to feel better.

Dieting status. Amount of food eaten was further analyzed by using scores on the Restraint Scale as an independent variable. Dieting (restraint) status had no main effects, nor did it interact with experimental condition.

Discussion

The results were largely consistent with our predictions. Under circumstances similar to everyday life, in which moods and emotional states can be changed, emotional distress led people to increase their consumption of snack foods. However, this pattern was eliminated and even reversed when people were told that their moods would not change during the experiment. Thus, the moodfreezing manipulation eliminated the tendency to eat more as a response to feeling bad. These findings suggest that people typically respond to distress by eating more fattening, unhealthy foods because they expect that enjoying such treats will make them feel better.

Several issues in the pattern of findings deserve comment. First, we observed some relative increase in eating among people whose moods were allegedly frozen in the happy condition. A likely explanation for this observation is that our mood-freezing procedure included an instruction suggesting that eating would tend to hold people's moods constant and prevent change. We said this on the assumption that all participants would be eating at least some amount, but participants may have taken it to mean that the more they ate, the longer their current state would continue. Although this instruction probably helped the mood-freezing manipulation have the desired effect in the distress condition, it may have had the unanticipated effect of making happy participants believe that eating would be a good affect regulation strategy for preserving their good mood. In other words, if you feel good, and you believe that eating will cause you to continue to feel good, it is rational to eat.

The second surprise in the data was that dieting status, as measured by the Restraint Scale, did not moderate the results. We had anticipated that effects would be strongest among dieters because they routinely engage in the self-control of eating, and so the loss of impulse control caused by emotional distress would be strongest for them. In this experiment, everyone behaved as we

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