Emotions and Experiences

The concept of “emotional eating” refers to food intake triggered by negative emotions however, this overlooks the influence of positive emotions on eating decisions. Previous studies on emotion-related eating are limited by their focus on sustained affective states and eating behaviours aggregated across longer time periods. When we investigated eating decisions on a trial-by-trial basis, momentary positive emotions led to greater snacking rates than negative or neutral emotions. Therefore, emotional eating following short term and longer-term affective states occurs via different mechanisms, with positive momentary emotions being an important trigger for increased snack consumption.

Sex is a deeply intimate part of our human experience. It drives our deepest passions and is the source of the most supremely unsexy scientific literature ever published. When we imagine what scientists actually do we may imagine them wearing a white coat whilst prodding and poking at someone in a laboratory, scribbling notes as they go. It may never have occurred to most people that sex, as with every other part of human physiology, has been brought into a laboratory and poked and prodded by people in white coats in the name of science. What they found out, and the ways in which they went about it, are nothing short of scientific (and comedy) gold.