Restricting, bingeing, and purging are powerful ways to regulate emotional states. However, these behaviours probably play different roles in emotional regulation. Whereas restriction is hypothesized to pre-empt the onset of highly emotional states, bingeing and purging is thought to act as a coping mechanism to deal with overwhelming emotional states once they’ve already been activated.
If this is true, we would expect to see more variability (or fluctuation) in the intensity and types of emotional states experienced by bulimia nervosa patients as opposed to restricting-type anorexia nervosa patients. The problem is that we know asking people to tell us how they’ve felt in the last week is not a very accurate way to get data. Our memories are not very accurate, we are prone to forgetting, and we are prone to bias, too. Besides, what we often report is often (whether we know it or not) strongly influenced by how we want to appear and the image we want to portray — both to others and to ourselves.
So how can researchers get around that? By using something called ecological momentary …