ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
The Relationship Between Social Emotions and Intuitive Eating Behaviors: An Exploration Based on Text Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Psychology, School of Education Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China
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The present study provides novel insights into the psychological mechanisms linking social emotions and eating behaviors by integrating large-scale social media analysis with individual-level assessments.Two complementary approaches were employed: Study 1 analyzed 1,902 Weibo posts containing "diet" and "social" keywords through latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling and semantic network analysis to identify thematic structures and interactional patterns; Study 2 surveyed 1,199 participants (aged 18–33) using the Intuitive Eating Scale and self-reported social situation texts, applying Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and LASSO regression to identify language features of intuitive eating. Results from Study 1 revealed six psychological themes and a semantic framework connecting social–dietary interactions, health discourse, emotional states, and body image concerns, while Study 2 demonstrated that negatively valenced words (e.g., sensitive, tiring) were associated with lower intuitive eating, whereas positively valenced words (e.g., relaxed, positive) were associated with healthier eating patterns; moreover, negative emotion scores in social texts showed significan correlations with poorer intuitive eating (p < 0.05). Together, these findings illustrate associations between social emotional expression and eating behaviors, highlighting implications for emotion-sensitive interventions and the design of healthier online social environments.
Keywords: Social Media, emotional expression, eating behaviors, text mining, semantic network, LASSO regression
Received: 09 Sep 2025; Accepted: 07 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wu, Wang, Zhu and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tour Liu, mikebonita@hotmail.com
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