Introduction:

Emotional eating is a form of disordered eating and is defined as the act of consuming food in response to negative emotions such as sadness, depressive symptoms, stress, anxiety and irritability. The Emotional Eating Scale for Children and Adolescents (EES-C) allows to identify the emotions that originate or appear in the CE. Objective: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the EES-C in adolescents residing in Northeast Mexico. And to analyze the relationships of the CE according to the sex, age and nutritional status of the participants.

Material and Methods:

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), reliability (internal consistency) and convergent validity of the EES-C in Spanish was performed. Participated 631 adolescents enrolled in the 7th to 9th grade of basic education residing in Northeast Mexico participated. Weight and height measurements were made and the nutritional status of the participants was obtained.

Results:

The goodness of fit indexes of the proposed model were acceptable: (CFI=0.921; GFI=0.907; AGFI=0.876; SRMS=0.055 and RMSEA=0.068). The internal consistency was acceptable (α=0.92). The average age of the participants was 13.74 years (SD=0.90), the weight ranged between 30.9 and 130.4kg (SD=13.20).

Conclusions:

The confirmatory factor analysis of the proposed model has a high internal consistency, and five-factor factor structure has an adequate fit. It can be used to measure emotional eating in Mexican adolescents. It is recommended to contrast this model in similar populations.

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