Childhood Emotional Experiences and Eating Psychopathology: The Mediational Role of Different Emotion Regulation Processes

Abstract

Positive experiences from childhood have been consistently associated with well-being and with feelings of social safeness and connectedness. On the other hand, the lack of early experiences characterized by warmth, soothing and care may lead to the later experience of fearing to receive compassion from others, to the engagement in self-judgment, and may be associated with a large spectrum of psychopathology. The present study tested a model which hypothesized that the impact of early positive memories with family figures on the engagement in disordered eating is carried by the mechanisms of social safeness and connectedness with others, fears of receiving compassion from others, and self-judgment. The sample comprised 399 women, aged between 18 and 55 years old. The path model accounted for 33% of eating psychopathology's variance and showed excellent model fit indices. Results revealed that the impact of early affiliative memories with family figures on eating psychopathology was totally mediated by the mechanisms of social safeness, fears of compassion from others, and self-judgment. In fact, women who reported a lack of early memories of warmth and safeness with family figures seemed to present lower feelings of safeness and connectedness within social relationships, higher tendency to fear receiving kindness and compassion from others, and more self-judgmental attitudes. These findings support the importance of developing intervention programs in the community, which target maladaptive emotion regulation processes (such as compassionate-based interventions) to promote mental health, especially in a context of early adverse experiences.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.