The 13-item DEBQ Emotional Eating subscale assesses the frequency of eating in response to clearly labeled (e.g., irritated, angry) and diffuse emotions (e.g., bored, let down) over the past week using a 5-point scale (never to very often). Eating in response to negative emotions is thought to be a core feature of overeating and binge eating (McManus & Waller, 1995), and women who binge eat and/or have BN score significantly higher on this subscale than obese and non-obese individuals who do not binge eat (Deaver et al., 2003; Wardle, 1987). The subscale has excellent internal consistency in our sample (see Table 1) and others (van Strien et al., 1986), as well as good factorial validity (van Strien et al., 1986).
