The Association between Food Addiction and Early Maladaptive Schemas in Overweight and Obese Women: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) as core features associated with eating psychopathology. The aims of the present study were to assess in overweight and obese women: (i) the association between dysfunctional eating patterns (i.e., food addiction and binge eating) and EMSs, and (ii) the association between food addiction and EMSs after controlling for potential confounding variables (i.e., binge eating severity and psychopathology). Participants were 70 overweight and obese women seeking low-energy-diet therapy. The patients were administered self-report measures investigating food addiction, binge eating, EMSs, anxiety symptoms, and depressive symptoms. Food addiction severity was strongly associated with all main schema domains. Binge eating severity was positively related to disconnection/rejection (r = 0.41; p < 0.01), impaired limits (r = 0.26; p < 0.05), and other-directedness domains (r = 0.27; p < 0.05). The disconnection/rejection schema was independently associated with food addiction severity, after controlling for the presence of other potential confounding variables (i.e., binge eating severity and psychopathology) suggesting that this domain may be a crucial factor for the development of food addiction.

The Potential Role of the Early Maladaptive Schema in Behavioral Addictions Among Late Adolescents and Young Adults

“…Food addiction correlated with the female gender, higher BMI, and the disconnection and rejection schema domain. This is in line with the only study that investigated the relationship between EMSs and FAs (Imperatori et al, 2017). The authors found that the disconnection and rejection schema was associated with FA, suggesting that this domain may play a key role for the development of FA.…”

“…According to previous studies that have investigated the association between EMSs and eating psychopathology (Pugh, 2015;Imperatori et al, 2017), our findings showed that participants with FA had higher scores in all four schema domains of the YSQ-S3. Additionally, in our sample, the scores of the impaired limits domain were higher in the group of participants who were positive to all three of the investigated BAs.…”

“…IA seems to be associated with all the schema domains (Shajari et al, 2016). Finally, researchers found that the disconnection/rejection schema domain was independently associated with FA severity, suggesting that this domain may be a crucial factor for the development of FA (Imperatori et al, 2017).…”

“…Many studies have found that EMSs are associated with the development of personality disorders (Sempértegui et al, 2013) and other psychopathological conditions (Basile et al, 2017;Aloi et al, 2019;Rania et al, 2019). EMSs have also recently been investigated in samples with GD (Shorey et al, 2012) and substance-use disorders (SUDs) (Shorey et al, 2013(Shorey et al, , 2014), but only a few studies have investigated the relationship between BAs and EMSs (Elmquist et al, 2016;Shajari et al, 2016;Imperatori et al, 2017). From the literature, it appears that GD patients are characterized by numerous EMSs, in particular by the schema domain impaired autonomy and performance (Shorey et al, 2012).…”

Early maladaptive schemas in overweight and obesity: A schema mode model

“…Previous studies [15, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31] have shown an association between early maladaptive schemas (i.e., abandonment, insufficient self-control social isolation, failure to achieve, defectiveness/ shame, dependence/ incompetence, entitlement/ grandiosity) and overeating, and other eating-related dysfunctional attitudes, such as food addiction and bingeing. Similarly, in our study overweight/obese participants reported more intense abandonment, dependence, subjugation and insufficient-self control schemas, compared with normal weight subjects.…”