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Emotional and Interoceptive Awareness and Its Relationship to Restriction in Young Women with Eating Disorders and Healthy Controls: a Cascade from Emotional to Behavioral Dysregulation

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Activitas Nervosa Superior

Abstract

Recent findings converge to the idea that the central function of eating disorders (ED) can be understood as an attempt to control unwanted or dysregulated emotions. The restriction of food intake can be seen as the predominant and general dysregulated behavior with the aim to reduce emotional experience in women with ED. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that emotional and interoceptive awareness as indexed by the Level of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ) will be in negative correlation with food restriction (Restriction Scale) and emotional eating (General Food Craving Questionnaire Trait). Our study was performed on women with ED (N = 73) and healthy controls (N = 207). The findings revealed that, in comparison with the controls, girls from the ED group were less able to discriminate their emotional states and were less aware of their body processes and autonomic nervous system reactivity. Contrary to our hypothesis, a three-stage hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed a significant effect of interoceptive sensitivity and emotional awareness on the restriction. Emotional and interoceptive awareness in women with ED explains the 25.2% variance of restriction in comparison with 8.8% in controls. It seems that the predominant use of restriction in the ED group could be explained by a limited repertoire of emotion regulation strategies or the persistent use of one emotion regulation strategy, such as restriction, while the controls had more options how to regulate their affect. Further studies are needed to explore the relations between these variables and the underlying causal mechanisms.

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Acknowledgements

This publication was written with the support of the grants MUNI/A/1310/2015 provided by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and FNBr, 65269705 provided by the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Psychosomatics, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Kamenice 5, 625 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Terezia Bernatova & Miroslav Svetlak

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, University Hospital Brno, Brno, Czech Republic

    Terezia Bernatova & Miroslav Svetlak

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  1. Terezia Bernatova
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  2. Miroslav Svetlak
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Correspondence to Miroslav Svetlak.

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Bernatova, T., Svetlak, M. Emotional and Interoceptive Awareness and Its Relationship to Restriction in Young Women with Eating Disorders and Healthy Controls: a Cascade from Emotional to Behavioral Dysregulation. Act Nerv Super 59, 78–86 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41470-017-0006-z

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