The role of emotions in food consumption choice: Systematic review and directions for future studies

Marketing researchers have extensively studied the causal influence of emotional state on food consumption. The present study offers a comprehensive systematic review of 111 articles related to the effect of emotions on unhealthy consumption over the past three decades-from 1993 to 2023. Applying the bibliometric coupling method identifies four main research themes in the marketing discipline: emotional eating: food as a coping mechanism, emotional eating: food as a reward, emotional eating: emotion as a multidimensional structure, and emotional eating: moderating effects of food sensory cues. Theoretical richness within each cluster is presented. In addition, the findings indicate that the marketing discipline has mainly relied on the proximate reasoning approach-explaining the causation and development of consumers' behavior-to describe the association between emotional state and food consumption choices. To broaden the scope of each research theme, we adopt the ultimate approach-explaining why a behavior exists-and focus on why unhealthy food consumption becomes a pattern of behavior. This study concludes by discussing the findings and offering several avenues for future research.