Uncontrolled eating in adolescents: The role of impulsivity and automatic approach bias for food

Abstract

Obesity is a global problem reaching epidemic proportions and can be explained by unhealthy eating and sedentary lifestyles. Understanding the psychological processes underlying unhealthy eating behaviour is crucial for the development of effective obesity prevention programmes. Dual-process models implicate the interplay between impaired cognitive control and enhanced automatic responsivity to rewarding food cues as key risk factors. The current study assessed the influence of four different components of trait impulsivity (reflecting impaired cognitive control) and automatic approach bias for food (reflecting automatic responsivity to food) on uncontrolled eating in a large sample (N = 504) of young adolescents. Of the four impulsivity factors, negative urgency was found to be the strongest predictor of uncontrolled eating. Interestingly, we found that lack of premeditation was a key risk factor for uncontrolled eating, but only when approach bias for food was high, supporting a dual-process model. Lack of perseverance showed a similar interactive pattern to a lesser degree and sensation-seeking did not predict uncontrolled eating. Together, our results show that distinct components of trait impulsivity are differentially associated with uncontrolled eating behaviour in adolescents, and that automatic processing of food cues may be an important factor in modulating this relationship.

Тhe Dark Triad, Amorality, and Impulsivity

“…They were probed by psychometric scales that were developed for use on the adult population. This has already been the case in previous studies involving UPPS (Booth, Spronk, Grol, & Fox, 2018;Van der Veen, Hershberger, & Cyders, 2016) and SD3 (Chabrol et al, 2009;Zuo, Wang, Xu, Wang, & Zhao, 2016) and Amoral 9 (Međedović et al, 2012) on high school age adolescent respondents. Our approach is further justified by the overall interpretability and good internal consistency of the data.…”

Evaluation of nutritional behaviour related to COVID-19

“…Among the eating behaviors that are thought to be related to each other, it is stated that emotional eating behavior causes more food intake than normal amounts in negative emotional states such as loneliness, depression and anger; uncontrolled eating behavior causes uncontrolled food intake tendency -which is much more than normal amounts, overeating-; cognitive restriction behavior causes deliberate restriction of food intake in order to achieve weight loss or control body weight. It is estimated that cognitive restriction behavior causes eating disorders such as binge eating syndrome (14)(15) .…”

Maladaptive Eating in Children and Adolescents With Obesity: Scrutinizing Differences in Inhibition

“…First, maladaptive eating behavior in adults is found to be at least partially explained by lower inhibition, which manifests itself as impulsive behavior (16,26). Impulsivity seems to explain why some people cannot resist external food cues (26)(27)(28)(29), not only in adults with obesity, but also in adolescents of varying weight (30). Consistently, children with overweight who are highly impulsive, consume more palatable foods in comparison to those with lower impulsivity (31).…”

“…Consistently, children with overweight who are highly impulsive, consume more palatable foods in comparison to those with lower impulsivity (31). However, evidence linking inhibition with eating behaviors in children and adolescents with obesity remains scarce (30,31). Second, inhibition is also found to be a determinant of weight status in both adults (32,33), children (34) and adolescents (35,36), with higher problems associated with higher weight.…”