Does Feeling Bad Lead to Eating Bad? How Emotion, Deliciousness (Mis)match, and Weight Status Alter Food Choice and ERPs

Negative emotion and perceived food deliciousness are important factors contributing to unhealthy food choices, but their interaction during food decision-making remains unclear. This study examined how negative emotion and deliciousness congruency influence high-calorie food choices and related event-related potential (ERP) responses in overweight individuals (OWs) and normal-weight individuals (NWs). Fifty female college students, including 24 OWs and 26 NWs, completed a binary food choice task before and after negative and neutral emotion induction. Participants chose high-calorie foods more frequently and responded faster in the deliciousness-incongruent condition than in the deliciousness-congruent condition. Negative emotion increased high-calorie food choices among OWs but not among NWs. The deliciousness-incongruent condition elicited less negative N1 amplitudes and marginally less negative N2 amplitudes. P3 amplitudes were modulated by emotion, group, and deliciousness congruency, with negative emotion reducing P3 amplitudes in NWs but not in OWs. High-calorie food choices are jointly shaped by negative emotion, deliciousness congruency, and weight status. Deliciousness advantage facilitates high-calorie food choices, whereas negative emotion selectively increases such choices among OWs. ERP results suggest that these effects involve both early attentional processing and later evaluative processing.