Objectives: Stress can leads to food craving. This problem has received a lot of attention. It has been found that people tend to eat sweet foods when they feel stressed, while others tend to eat spicy foods. In view of the various benefits of spicy foods, this study sought to figure out whether stress and spicy food craving are related.
Methods: A cross-sectional investigation was used to get data from 196 valid female individuals, including the Perceived Stress Scale, the Spicy Food Craving Questionnaire and the Spicy Food Emotion Questionnaire. In order to test the relationship between spicy food craving and perceived stress, as well as the underlying mechanism, The Lind and Mehlum’s three-step procedure testing U-shaped relationship and Hayes and Preacher's procedure testing instantaneous indirect effect was utilized in the current statistical analysis.
Results: Three-step procedure analysis confirmed U-shaped relationship between perceived stress and spicy food craving(β=0.188，p＜0.05, ΔR²=0.035; β=0.182，p＜0.05, ΔR²=0.033). Mediational analysis showed that the positive emotion when consuming spicy food has a non-curving mediating effect in the relationship between perceived stress and spicy food craving. On the whole, The results of the instantaneous effect showed that the indirect effect of stress on spicy food craving through emotion was significantly negative at low stress level(θ=-0.270, 95%CI(-0.773,0.213)), while the indirect effect was significantly positive at medium and high stress levels(θ=0.127, 95%CI(-0.158,0.454); θ=0.523, 95%CI(0.136,1.223)).
Conclusions: The current study found that the positive emotions generated by spicy food intake had a non-curving mediating role in the U-shaped relationship between stress and spicy food craving. This study firstly investigated the relationship between stress and spicy food craving. So it provided a fresh direction for future research on spicy food craving.