Sociocultural considerations in food addiction and emotional eating: comparative evidence from college students in the United States and South Korea

Food addiction and emotional eating are two eating-related constructs that have been linked to obesity and poor mental health, but the extent to which they reliably co-occur across different cultural contexts is less clear. Given that sociocultural norms and food environments differ between countries, this study examined whether food addiction and emotional eating are associated in undergraduate samples from the United States ( n = 110) and South Korea ( n = 141), and whether scores differ across key demographic subgroups within each country. Using a cross-sectional design, food addiction was assessed with the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 (YFAS 2.0), and emotional eating was assessed with the Emotional Eating Scale–II (EES-II). Consistent with the study’s central hypothesis, food addiction and emotional eating were strongly and positively correlated in both samples (South Korea r = 0.74; United States r = 0.53; both p < 0.001), and this association was significantly stronger in the South Korean sample (Fisher’s z = 2.82, p = 0.005). In a hierarchical regression, emotional eating remained a robust predictor of food addiction symptoms after adjusting for country, age, gender, and sexual orientation (Δ R 2 = 0.25, p < 0.001). Additionally, cisgender women reported higher emotional eating than cisgender men overall ( p = 0.007), while gender differences in food addiction symptoms were not statistically significant ( p = 0.069). Overall, these findings indicate pronounced cross-cultural differences in both food addiction symptoms and emotional eating, suggesting that sociocultural factors may shape how these eating-related behaviors are expressed, highlighting the importance of culturally informed strategies to address emotional regulation in increasingly obesogenic food environments worldwide.