The Influence of Avoidant Personality Disorder-traits on Emotional Eating

Abstract

Emotional eating is described as the tendency to eat unhealthy foods in response to a range of negative emotions in order to cope with this negative affect. The current study focuses on emotional eating in individuals with traits of an avoidant personality disorder (APD-traits), since emotional eating is linked to several eating disorders, which in turn are consistently associated with APD. Furthermore, following the considerable overlap between avoidance as the main coping mechanism of individuals with APD and the escape theory explaining emotional eating, it could be that individuals with APD avoid or escape their negative emotions by emotional eating. In this study, emotional eating was regarded as unhealthy eating when negative emotions were reported. To explore the influence of APD-traits on emotional eating, APD-traits were operationalized as the schema-constructs Defectiveness/Shame- and Social Undesirability and measured with the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ), negative emotions were measured using single items and unhealthy eating was measured using a self-developed task. A total of n = 130 participants took part in this study, consisting of 113 women and 17 men. It was hypothesized that individuals with an increased amount of APD-traits who report negative emotions score higher on unhealthy eating than individuals with a low amount of APD-traits reporting negative emotions. Results showed that the hypothesis had to be rejected. This study did not provide evidence for a link between APD and emotional eating.