Ricerc@Sapienza

Purpose: Binge eating is predicted by emotion dysregulation and poor emotional awareness. Dysfunctional metacognition is also implied in several eating disorders, but research has not yet investigated the interactions among emotional and metacognitive processes involved in binge eating. The present study investigated the relation between metacognition and binge eating in a sample of adolescents, testing the interaction effect between the need to control thoughts and the lack of emotional awareness on binge eating.

This study aimed to investigate Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotional awareness in drunkorexia, an emerging behavior characterized by calorie restriction when drinking alcohol is planned. A sample of 246 adolescents (148 females, 98 males; range 17–20) completed self-reported measures assessing drunkorexia, ToM and lack of emotional awareness. Drunkorexia was negatively correlated with ToM abilities, with reading neutral emotions, and positively with lack of emotional awareness. ToM and lack of emotional awareness were also found to predict drunkorexia.

Members of highly social species decode, interpret, and react to the emotion of a conspecific depending on whether the other belongs to the same (ingroup) or different (outgroup) social group. While studies indicate that consciously perceived emotional stimuli drive social categorization, information about how implicit emotional stimuli and specific physiological signatures affect social categorization is lacking. We addressed this issue by exploring whether subliminal and supraliminal affective priming can influence the categorization of neutral faces as ingroup versus outgroup.