The moderating role of valence-specific urgency on the association between positive and negative emotion regulation difficulties and disordered eating in a clinically elevated sample of college students.

Résumé

OBJECTIVE: Theory highlights the role of emotion regulation (ER) and impulsivity in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Although the associations between negative ER, impulsivity features, and eating disorder symptoms are well-documented, the role of positively-valanced ER difficulties remain unclear. To address this gap, we adopted a transbehavioral approach to examine how valence-specific urgency and emotion regulation difficulties individually and interactively relate to disordered eating behaviors.METHOD: Our sample consisted of 181 college students with heterogeneous symptom severity presentations. Participants completed self-report measures for (1) negative and positive ER difficulties, (2) negative and positive urgency, and (3) eating disorder behaviors.RESULTS: Positive ER difficulties were positively associated with binge eating and fasting frequency at low levels of positive urgency. Additionally, negative ER difficulties were significantly associated with purging frequency at both low and high levels of negative urgency, but a stronger positive association was observed when negative urgency was low. Furthermore, negative ER difficulties were significantly associated with binge eating frequency at low levels of negative urgency.CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to our hypotheses, disordered eating behaviors were more strongly associated with emotion regulation difficulties at lower levels of urgency. These findings suggest that emotion regulation difficulties may represent a distinct pathway to disordered eating beyond urgency-related risk and highlight the importance of considering both emotion regulation and urgency in understanding eating disorder symptomatology.