Self-esteem as a better predictor of restrained eaters' food intake than attributional style and disinhibition tendency
✍ Scribed by ANITA JANSEN; ELLEN LOUWERSE; NATASCHA LEEMANS; ERIK SCHOUTEN
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 158 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0890-2070
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In the present study, a weight increase or decrease was experimentally manipulated in restrained and unrestrained eating subjects. It was hypothesized that restrained eating subjects in the high-weight condition will attribute the cause of this important negative event to internal, stable, and global factors. Such a depressogenic attributional style was expected to be reflected in a more depressed mood which, in its turn, should trigger disinhibitive eating during a bogus taste test. Moreover, it was hypothesized that high scores on Zuckerman's disinhibition subscale and low self-esteem were related to larger food intake.
Main findings were that a manipulated weight increase indeed lowered the mood of restrained eaters, whereas it had no effect on the mood of unrestrained eaters. However, the weight increase and the mood decrease of restrained subjects in the high-weight condition were not reflected in a more depressive attributional style and increased food intake. Level of self-esteem appeared to be the best and only predictor of restrained eaters' food intake with lower-self-esteem subjects eating less during the taste test. Moreover, although the restrained subjects scored significantly higher on a general measure of disinhibition than the unrestrained ones, disinhibition was not a very strong predictor of food intake.