Difficulties in Emotional Regulation May Mediate the Relationship Between Low Mindfulness and High Emotional Eating in Adolescents with Obesity.

Although the effect of mindfulness on emotion regulation is known, the relationship between mindfulness and emotional eating has not been well-studied in adolescents to date. In this study, we investigated whether mindfulness has a direct effect on the level of emotional eating or whether this association is mediated by emotional dysregulation in a sample of adolescents with obesity. Our sample consisted of 80 adolescents with obesity. All participants were administered the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ-EE), and the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). The mean age of the sample was 15.32 ± 1.07, the mean body weight was 93.33 ± 20.84 kg, and the BMI percentile was 98.33 ± 1.65. In total, 22.5% of mothers and 7.5% of fathers were obese. There were significant associations between high emotional eating and emotion dysregulation and low mindfulness. In two mediation models, the indirect effects obtained by using DERS-total and DERS-impulsivity as the mediators were statistically significant on the path between MAAS and DEBQ-emotion [ = -0.148, confidence interval (CI) = -0.318/-0.031; = -0.114, CI = -0.233/-0.015, respectively], indicating a significant mediating effects of DERS-total and DERS-impulsivity. We suggest that emotional eating increases as mindfulness decreases, through emotional dysregulation, particularly difficulty in regulating impulsivity.