Research & Discovery

Is Your Partner’s Crummy Behavior Making You Eat More?

Your partner’s rotten behavior is not making you reach for that Little Debbie snack cake, new research from the University of Virginia shows.

Previous studies have associated stressful relationships with unhealthy overeating, which, over the long term, leads to poor health. But new work has found the opposite.

When your partner isn’t offering you the emotional support you need, didn’t pay the mortgage on time or has somehow violated your trust, researchers found people were not reaching for a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips.

“When you have these kinds of moments of relational stress, interestingly enough, snacking for individuals goes down,” Jennifer MacCormack, an assistant professor of social psychology, said. “That actually surprised us because it was a little different than what we had anticipated.”

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The researchers analyzed 14-day diaries kept by 100 couples who were asked to record negative relationship behaviors and their snacking behavior.

“As relationship conflict seems to increase in your relationship dynamics or something negative is happening in your relationship, people will temporarily dip in their snacking behaviors,” said MacCormack, who directs the Virginia Affect & Interoception Laboratory, which produced the research.

That, she noted, did not hold true for people who were already predisposed to emotional overeating.

Portrait of Jennifer MacCormack, an assistant professor of social psychology.

Jennifer MacCormack, an assistant professor of social psychology, called the study findings surprising. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

What is novel about the study is that it looks at human behaviors over a period of time. “We wanted to see in real life how relational stress and snacking are interrelated and also think about the couple themselves, the romantic couple, as a unit,” she said.

The researchers focused on snacking versus meals because snacks go beyond a person’s typical fuel intake at breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Snacking behavior is probably what’s going to be more affected by these emotional shifts in our relationships,” MacCormack said.

The findings, published in the journal Appetite, have implications for people’s long-term health.

“I think it’s important that when we think about people’s diets and their metabolic health, it shows that people are not in a vacuum,” she said. “Their relationships really do matter for shaping the dynamics of their eating behaviors.”