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Eating Behavior Under Stress

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Submitted By lena0309
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Cologne Business School (CBS)

Eating behavior under stress

Term paper for ‘Empirical Social Research’

Summer Semester 2012

Student Names: Lena
Business Psychology

Table of contents

1 Introduction 1 1.1 How we conducted our task 1

2 Definitions 2

2.1 Stress 2

2.1.1 Positive stress 2

2.1.2 Negative stress 2

2.1.3 Origin of ravenous appetite under stress 2

3 Methodology 3

3.1 Survey research 3

3.2 Secondary data 3

4 Research Question and Hypotheses 4

5 Self-conducted survey 5

5.1 Survey 6

5.2 Outcome 6

5.3 Reliability, Validity and Causality 7

6 Secondary Survey 10

6.1 Survey 10

6.2 Outcome 11

6.3 Comparison between the two surveys 12

7 Conclusion 13

8 Bibliography 14

9 Appendix 16

10 Affidavit

1 Introduction

‘Stressed is Desserts spelled backward’ was already stated by Brian Luke Seaward (2001).

This term paper discusses the issue of changing eating behavior in stressful times as in the students’ case: exam periods. Exam periods mean for most of the students a high level of stress due to lack of time for studying as well as lack of time for eating. Therefore a high quantity of students tends to eat unhealthy food like fast food, candy and chocolate to minimize hunger, as a distraction from studying and to get a new heap of motivation and encouragement.

Our motivation to write this paper came from our Business Psychology class where we discussed

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