Study On The Relationship Between Delayed Discount And Impulsive Sex And Eating Disorder And Dieting Success In Different Sub - Restricted Diets

Impulsiveness refers to the tendency to respond with insufficient forethought, planning or control and has been linked to increased food intake and overeating in obese. As an effective behavior measure, the Delay Discounting Task (DDT) reflects the impulsivity characteristic, which closely related to human’s irrational decision making. In this study, DDT was applied in college students for a better understanding of the impulsive characteristics (except DDT, also included other impulsivity dimensions be reflected by another behavior measure and a questionnaire) related to female college students’ restrained eating problems and its influence on eating behaviors and the success in dieting.Three parts are included in this paper:first of all, the author made an exploratory and confirmatory analysis to verify the applicability of the DEBQ in female college* students, with which the restrained eaters could be classified in the follow-up study. Secondly,40 unrestrained eaters,40 successful restrained eaters and 40 unsuccessful restrained eaters, sampled from the normal population, were tested on the food-money related Delay Discounting Task (Food-Money DDT), the Door Open Task (DOT), the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11 (BIS-11) and some questionnaires on general demographic information. The impulsive variables were compared between groups using multivariable analysis of variance (ANOVA) with restrained groups and social demographic variables as between-groups factors. Bivariate correlation was used to explore the relations among different impulsive variables. The relationships between the restrictive diet behavior and impulsivity dimensions were also established by way of a series of regression analyses. And lastly,40 unrestrained eaters and 100 restrained eaters were screened for this study. Food-Money DDT, the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI), Perceived Self-Regulatory Success in Dieting (PSRS) were used for the difference of AUC and the scores of the eating disorder and the perceived self-regulatory success in dieting scales between the three experimental groups. The results showed that:1. The DEBQ has the stable structure validity, including restrained eating, emotional eating and external eating. Furthermore, restrained eating showed a significant correlation with external eating.2. There were no significant difference between groups which divided by demographic factors, such as age, BMI, major, homeplace and family economic income on the impulse variables. Simple-effects analyses found that unsuccessful group showed great significant difference with controls on AUC and the times of doors opened and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale. They discounted more on food, opened more doors, got higher scores on total BIS, BIS_AT and BIS_MI. No such differences were seen on AUC for money-DDT and BIS_NI.3. There was no correlation among three impulsive tasks. Emotional eating showed a significant negatively correlation with AUC, and was uniquely associated with AUC for delay discounting for food (accounting for 3.4% of the variance).4. The significant difference of AUC for money-DDT, PSRS, total EDI and most of its subscales was found among the unrestrained group, successful restrained group and the successful restrained group. In restrained eaters, the correlation between AUC and the eating disorder tendency of gluttony was significant, and the eating disorder tendency of bulimia, body dissatisfaction and PSRS had a significant correlation. Bulimia and body dissatisfaction were uniquely associated with PSRS (accounting for 13.4% of the variance in all).In conclusion, the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire was stable in factor structure, excellent in reliability and validity, and can be used as a useful tool in evaluating eating behaviors. Meanwhile, the results supported the hypothesis that restrained eaters were more impulsive than the unrestrained eaters both on behavior tasks and self-report scale. Three tasks reflect different impulsiveness dimensions. The relationship between emotional eating and delay discounting was closer. Emotional eating has good predictive validity on discount level.Besides that, the impulsive behavior which was reflected by DDT has a close relation to eating behavior and eating psychological characteristics, mainly reflected in the behavior of gluttony. Furthermore, the perceived self-regulatory success in dieting has a close relation with two psychological characteristics aspects of bulimia and body dissatisfaction.