Investigating effect of conscientiousness on the relationship between ego-threatening stress and eating behaviour

Abstract

A variety of research shows that students experience high levels of ego-threatening stress. This stress form mainly concentrates on feelings of insecurity, fear of failure and endangerment. Ego-threatening stress has a relationship with overeating, this can be explained by the fact that the person wishes to escape from self-awareness which frequently leads to a change in their eating behaviour namely overeating. Therefore it is important to search for a factor that can influence this relationship. A factor that can buffer this effect is personality, namely conscientiousness. The main hypothesis was that conscientiousness moderates the relationship between ego-threatening stress and eating behaviour. To test this a laboratory experiment was devised, with 72 participants randomly divided in an ego-threatening stress group (unsolvable anagram) and a control (solvable anagram) group. The experiment questioned conscientiousness by using the NEO Five-Factor Inventory. Afterwards the subjects were asked to fill in the anagram and were given 100 grams of M&M’s to consume. At the conclusion of the experiment the M&M’s were weight to measure how many grams was consumed. The manipulation check regarding stress showed that the ego-threatening stress group experienced higher stress levels stress then the control group. Unfortunately, the results showed that ego-threatening stress group did not show overeating in comparison to the control group. Participants with a high level of conscientiousness did not show undereating compared to students with low level conscientiousness. The interaction effect showed that conscientiousness did not moderate the relationship between ego-threatening stress and eating behaviour. It is a possibility that conscientiousness is a confounding factor that influences the stress variable. Future research could test if this factor is indeed a confounder in the relationship between stress and eating behaviour. Also to get a better understanding of the influence of personality more research is needed.