Do emotions mediate the relationship between eating pathology and autistic traits?
https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-3-S1-O25
© Mansour et al. 2015
Published: 23 November 2015
Keywords
Introduction
An overlap between Eating Disorders (EDs) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been proposed based on clinical and behavioural observations. No research to date has however assessed the potential mechanisms linking the two disorder sets.
Objectives
To assess the extent of overlap in levels of eating pathology and ASD traits and to explore potential mechanisms linking the two disorder sets by assessing the mediating effects of negative attitudes towards emotions and emotion dysregulation.
Methods
401 university students (82.8% females), filled in an online questionnaire including the following measures: the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), the Empathy Quotient (EQ), the Systemising Quotient (SQ), the Attitudes towards Emotional Expression Scale (ATEE), and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS).
Results
With, the exception of Empathy and Systemising, all other ASD traits were positively related to ED symptoms (p<0.05). Multiple mediation analyses indicated that the indirect effect of AQ on EAT-26 through DERS was significant, indicating full mediation. Conversely, the indirect effect via ATEE was insignificant (close to zero) and therefore ATEE does only partially mediate the relationship between AQ and EAT-26.
Conclusions
The association between EDs and ASD that has been identified in clinical samples extends into non-clinical samples. The mediation analyses results indicate that AQ operates on EAT-26 via DERS as a full mediator.
Authors’ Affiliations
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
