Research suggests that individuals with eating disorders use more maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in response to emotional distress.... Show moreResearch suggests that individuals with eating disorders use more maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in response to emotional distress. However, these studies do not consider that the efficacy of emotion regulation strategies vary across situations. Recent evidence suggests that healthy emotion regulation is characterized by an ability to flexibly choose between emotion regulation strategies across changing contexts. Despite evidence supporting this conceptualization of healthy emotion regulation, no research has investigated it in relation to eating pathology. This study examined whether eating pathology and difficulties in emotion regulation were associated with emotion regulation choice patterns and flexibility. Female college students (N = 50) completed self-report questionnaires and a laboratory-based emotion regulation choice task to assess emotion regulation flexibility. Generalized estimating equations indicated that individuals with higher levels of eating pathology displayed similar emotion regulation choice patterns and flexibility as those with low levels of eating pathology. Individuals who displayed specific types of emotion regulation difficulties (i.e., emotional clarity, emotional awareness and impulse control difficulties) displayed different emotion regulation choice patterns and flexibility compared to individuals without such difficulties. These results suggest that specific difficulties in emotion regulation have a greater influence on emotion regulation choice patterns and flexibility than eating pathology. Show less
