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It is a widely held view that humans have control over their food choices and consumption. However, research also suggests that eating behavior is often triggered by contextual cues and guided by automaticities and habits. Interestingly, the dichotomy between automatic and controlled processing has recently been challenged, suggesting that they may be intertwined. In a large female sample (n = 567), we investigated the hypothesis that task-based and self-reported measures of automatic and controlled processing would interact and impact self-reported eating behavior. Results analyzed via structural equation modeling suggest that automatic, but not controlled processing, during a modified flanker task, including a context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) manipulation, was inversely associated with self-reported self-control. The influence of self-control on unhealthy eating behavior (i.e., uncontrolled and emotional eating, heightened consumption of fat and sugar) was only indirect via habitual behavior, which itself had a strong direct impact. Unhealthy eating was further associated with real-life outcomes (e.g., body mass index (BMI)). Our findings suggest that eating behavior may indeed be guided primarily by automaticities and habits, whereas self-control might facilitate this association. Having self-control over eating might therefore be most effective by avoiding contextual cues eliciting undesired automatic behavior and establishing habits that serve long-term goals.

Objective Research has shown that rumination and negative affect are elevated in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN), but the underlying origins remain unclear. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the Goal Progress Theory of rumination, we propose that heightened feelings of “inefficiency” (i.e., low self‐efficacy) in AN might play an important role in these dysfunctional cognitive‐affective processes. Method Thirty‐two weight‐recovered participants with a history of AN and 32 healthy control participants filled out questionnaires regarding rumination and affect six times a day over a period of 2 weeks via ecological momentary assessment in real‐life. Results Analyses via hierarchical as well as conceptual process modeling suggest that while inefficiency is generally associated with more rumination and negative affect, additional amplifying mechanisms between these variables exist specifically in recovered participants with a history of AN. Discussion Inefficiency as a core aspect of AN appears to trigger dysfunctional cognitive‐affective processes which may contribute to vulnerability for AN.

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A growing body of evidence suggests that a high level of self-control may, despite its positive effects, influence cognitive processing in an unfavorable manner. However, the affective costs of self-control have only rarely been investigated. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder that is often characterized by excessive self-control. Here, we used fMRI to explore whether over-control in AN may have negative affective consequences. 36 predominantly adolescent female AN patients and 36 age-matched healthy controls (HC) viewed negative and neutral pictures during two separate fMRI sessions before and after 10 min of rest. We tested whether abnormally elevated neural activity during the initial presentation in a brain region broadly implicated in top-down control, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), could predict subsequent activation in limbic areas relevant to bottom-up affective processing. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we also tested for associations between the aforementioned neuroimaging markers and negative affective states in the two weeks following the experiment. fMRI data revealed that higher initial activation of the dlPFC in AN predicted increased amygdala reactivity during the second fMRI session, which in turn was related to increased self-reported tension during two weeks following the scan. These data suggest that over-control in AN patients may come at a cost including negative affective states on a short (minutes) as well as a longer time scale (days). This mechanism may significantly contribute to the persistence of AN.