New Turkish Questionnaire Captures the Full Spectrum of Emotional Eating

When people reach for ice cream after a breakup or lose their appetite entirely before a job interview, they are exhibiting what psychologists call emotional eating. For decades, the scientific literature has treated this behavior as a single phenomenon, usually defined as eating more in response to negative feelings. A new study published in the Journal of Eating Disorders argues that this picture is far too narrow, and it offers Turkish researchers the first validated tool capable of measuring emotional eating in all of its complexity. The work, led by Beyza Katırcıoğlu and Murat Baş of Acibadem Mehmet Ali Aydinlar University in Istanbul, translated and tested the Comprehensive Emotional Eating Scale, or CEES, in a large sample of Turkish adults, and the results suggest the instrument performs remarkably well.

The conceptual foundation of the CEES is deceptively simple but represents a significant departure from earlier measures. Emotional eating, in this framework, is a multidimensional construct with four distinct dimensions: overeating in response to positive emotions, overeating in response to negative emotions, undereating in response to positive emotions, and undereating in response to negative emotions. Most existing questionnaires capture only the negative-overeating quadrant, which means researchers have historically been blind to people who celebrate with food, who suppress their appetite when distressed, or who cannot eat when they are happy. The Turkish validation study is the first to bring this complete four-dimensional framework to a Turkish-speaking population, filling what the authors describe as a genuine gap in the available assessment instruments.

To test the scale, the research team recruited 897 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 65. Methodological studies of this kind require careful statistical architecture, and the investigators split their sample into two demographically matched subsamples of 449 and 448 participants. The first subsample was used for exploratory factor analysis, a technique that allows the underlying structure of a questionnaire to emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. The second subsample was reserved for confirmatory factor analysis, which tests whether the structure discovered in the first half holds up in an independent group of respondents. This two-step design is considered best practice in psychometrics because it guards against the common pitfall of building and validating a model on the same data.

The exploratory analysis delivered a clean verdict. The Turkish CEES reproduced the expected four-factor structure, corresponding to positive overeating, positive undereating, negative overeating, and negative undereating, and these four factors together accounted for 70.0 percent of the total variance in responses. In questionnaire research, explaining seven-tenths of the variance is an unusually strong result, indicating that the items cluster tightly around the intended dimensions. Internal consistency, which reflects how well the items within each subscale measure the same underlying construct, was excellent across the board, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.948 to 0.962. Values above 0.90 are typically regarded as excellent, and these figures place the Turkish CEES among the most internally consistent instruments in the emotional eating literature.

Reliability over time was assessed by asking a subset of participants to complete the questionnaire a second time, two weeks after their first administration. The intraclass correlation coefficients for the four subscales ranged from 0.80 to 0.84, and the total score achieved an intraclass correlation of 0.91, indicating that people’s answers remained stable across the two-week interval. This test-retest stability matters because emotional eating is conceptualized as a relatively enduring behavioral tendency rather than a fleeting mood-dependent state. A questionnaire whose results swing wildly from one fortnight to the next would be of limited use for tracking individuals in research studies or, eventually, in clinical practice.

The confirmatory stage of the study involved a sophisticated comparison of competing statistical models. The researchers tested a standard confirmatory factor model, an exploratory structural equation model, and a bifactor exploratory structural equation model, the latter allowing for both a general emotional eating factor and specific subscale factors simultaneously. The bifactor model that incorporated three additional specific factors for semantically overlapping items demonstrated the best fit to the data, with a comparative fit index of 0.996, a Tucker-Lewis index of 0.994, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.089, and a standardized root mean square residual of 0.043. Fit indices close to or above 0.95 for CFI and TLI, and below 0.08 for SRMR, are conventionally interpreted as indicating excellent model fit. Notably, the bifactor solution supported the four subscale factors alongside only a weak general factor, which carries an important implication: emotional eating in this framework is best understood as four related but distinct patterns rather than a single unified tendency, and researchers should analyze the subscales separately rather than relying on a total score alone.

A further question in cross-cultural psychometrics is whether a questionnaire functions equivalently across different groups. If an instrument measures something different in men than in women, or in younger versus older adults, comparisons between those groups become meaningless. The Turkish CEES team therefore tested measurement invariance across gender, age, marital status, and body mass index categories. At the subscale level, changes in fit indices were generally consistent with metric and scalar invariance across sex, marital status, and age, meaning the scale measures the same constructs in the same way across these groups. The authors do, however, urge caution in two respects: the baseline models showed limited absolute fit, and the comparisons across body mass index categories were less straightforward, so BMI-related group comparisons should be interpreted with care until further evidence accumulates.

Convergent validity, the demonstration that a new scale correlates with other measures in theoretically expected ways, was established through correlations with four established instruments: the 13-item Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, the eight-item Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale, the 16-item Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, and the 14-item Perceived Stress Scale. The Turkish CEES scores exhibited the theoretically consistent associations with eating disorder psychopathology, emotional dysregulation, stress, and psychological distress. In other words, people who reported more emotional eating of a given type also tended to report more eating-related problems, greater difficulty managing their emotions, and higher levels of stress and psychological distress, exactly the pattern that theories of emotional eating would predict.

The practical significance of this validation extends well beyond the statistics. Türkiye has a growing community of researchers working on obesity, disordered eating, and the psychological drivers of dietary behavior, but until now they have lacked a Turkish-language instrument that captures the full positive and negative, overeating and undereating spectrum. With the CEES now available in Turkish, studies can distinguish, for example, between someone who eats excessively when anxious and someone who stops eating when celebrating, two behaviors with potentially very different metabolic and psychological consequences. The four-dimensional profile could also help clinicians and dietitians understand why some patients gain weight under stress while others lose it, a distinction that single-dimension scales have obscured.

The authors are careful to note the limits of their work. The validation was conducted in healthy adults, and the clinical utility of the Turkish CEES in patient populations, such as individuals with diagnosed eating disorders or obesity undergoing treatment, requires further validation before the scale can be used confidently in clinical settings. The study also received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. Even with those caveats, the study represents a substantial methodological contribution: a rigorously tested, four-dimensional, psychometrically strong Turkish measure of emotional eating, validated in nearly nine hundred adults with state-of-the-art factor analytic techniques. For a field that has long relied on instruments capturing only a fraction of the emotional eating phenomenon, the arrival of a comprehensive Turkish-language tool is likely to reshape how researchers in Türkiye study the tangled relationship between feelings and food.

Subject of Research: Validation of the Turkish version of the Comprehensive Emotional Eating Scale, a four-dimensional measure of emotional eating

Article Title: Psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the comprehensive emotional eating scale

Article References: Psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the comprehensive emotional eating scale. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01773-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01773-w

Keywords: emotional eating, psychometrics, scale validation, overeating, undereating, eating disorders, emotion regulation, factor analysis, Turkish adults, measurement invariance, test-retest reliability, Journal of Eating Disorders