Do Binge Eaters Have Less Control Over Their Emotions?

It’s no secret that college students report a high degree of unhealthy eating behaviors. Approximately 16% to 19% of female college students and 6% to 7% of males in college report binge eating on a regular basis. Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, wanted to determine if those who binge eat do so because they have a more difficult time controlling their emotions than do non-bingeing students.

Dr. Ursala Whiteside and colleagues designed a study to evaluate whether difficulties controlling emotions could be the explanation for the variance in binge eating, and also looked at the types of emotion regulation that are most closely linked to binge eating (Eating Behaviors 2007; 162). To do so, they administered the Eating Disorders Diagnostic Scale and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS;Grantz and Roemer, 2004) to 695 (284 male, 411 female) psychology undergraduates. In addition to assessing the impact of age and gender, the researchers evaluated food restriction, over-evaluation of weight and shape, difficulty regulating emotions, and binge eating among the students.

Food restriction was evaluated by asking the participants the following question, which they answered using a scale of 0 to 14: “How many times per week on average over the past 3 months have you fasted (skipped at least 2 meals in a row) to prevent weight gain or to counteract the effects of eating?” Over-evaluation of weight and shape was measured using a composite score of the three eating disorders diagnostic scales and weight and shape items. Binge eating was evaluated by a two-item continuous measure of binge eating, in which subjects were asked how many times per week on average over the past three months they had eaten an unusually large amount of food and felt a loss of control. Finally, difficulty regulating emotions was assessed with the DERS. The DERS includes 36 questions, such as “When I am upset I have difficulty concentrating.”

What the researchers found

Of the 695 students, 106 (15% of the full sample, 8% of men and 20% of women) reported an average of one or more binge eating episode per week during the past three months. Seventy-nine percent of those who reported one or more episodes of binge eating per week were female. Although the goal of this study was to assess the behavior involved in binge eating, an incidental finding was that 8% of the binge-eating individuals (1% of the full sample) met DSM-IV criteria for binge eating disorder (BED).

As the authors noted, the primary purpose of their study was evaluating the extent to which difficulties regulating emotions, food restriction, and over-evaluation of weight and shape are associated with binge eating. Each was independently associated with binge eating. Difficulties regulating emotion accounted for a unique variance in binge eating, beyond food restriction and over-evaluation of weight and shape.

The authors found that binge eating was associated with difficulties in changing negative moods. In this study, binge eaters were likely to indicate that they had difficulty changing negative moods, and that the negative mood persisted when they were upset.