Impacts Of Self-regulatory Resource Depletion On Eating Behaviors Of Restrained Eater

As a serious kind of eating disorder related to domestic affluence and food abundance, bulimia nervosa is considered a widespread healthy problem in typical developed countries. However, it also emerged in large developing country of China in recent years. Restricted eating refers to consistent, cognitively mediated efforts to restrict eating for the purpose of weight control. Prior researches showed that unlike unrestrained eaters, restrained eaters are more likely to develop into overeating, and led to problematic eating behaviors such as bulimia nervosa.Early theories of mechanism of restrained eating focused on their sensitivity of inner cues, such as the Boundary Model. The boundary model proposed that the cognitive process rather than physical process plays a more important role in food intake regulation of restrained eaters. Particularly, they have set themselves a "dieting boundary", which might easily been broke through and led to overconsumption. Typical self-regulatory resources depletion experimental paradigm generally instructs participants to finish cognitive task to depleted their self-regulatory resources, and operate the "taste-test" at the same time or after the task to exam their food intake. Studies used this paradigm generally draw consistent conclusion that the self-regulatory resources depletion significantly predicted restrained eaters rather than unrestrained eaters’overeating, which supported the boundary model. In the recent years, more and more researches adopted the Goal Conflict Model to interpret restrained eaters’ overeating. Goal conflict model assumed that restrained eaters are always faced with two conflict goals—the eating pleasure goal and weight maintaining goal. When confronted with palatable food, the activation of eating pleasure goal inhibits the weight maintaining goal, which then led to restrained eaters’overeating.Nevertheless, research conclusions about restrained eaters’eating behavior are controversy. First, the generally used bulimia nervosa model made no consistent conclusion about the support for the restraint pathway. The Stice’s dual pathway model proposed that body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness predicts bulimia nervosa tendency through two different pathways—the negative affect and the restraint pathway. Replications of dual pathway model generally supported the significant link between negative affect and bulimic pathology, but no consistent conclusion was drawn about the hypothesized prediction of restraint pathway, suggested that there maybe exists more complex inner process along the restrained eating toward bulimia nervosa. Second, studies about restrained eaters’eating behavior are of no according results. For instance, evidences reveal that the more "successful" individuals might have existed among restrained eaters, which predict lower conditional food consumption. According to goal conflict model, some restrained eaters exerted self control repeatedly when faced with palatable food cues, which facilitated the automatic associations between food cues and weight maintaining goal. Thus, they might not turn into conditional overeating. Additionally, the participants screened by Restrained Scale (RS), the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) and the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ) might show different eating behavior tendency. For example, scale analysis indicates that the RS is more likely to filter individuals related to "dieting failure", which then mixed the results of behavioral studies.Researches explored the risky factors of restrained eaters’overeating revealed that individuals with high level of disinhibited eating showed higher attentional reaction tendency to palatable food cues and predicts more overeating behaviors, suggests that the cognitive dietary tendency might not predict dieting failure alone. Instead, we should also take the cognitive disinhibition into account. Disinhibited eating reflects a habitual tendency towards overeating and eating opportunistically in an obesigenic environment. The typical features of disinhibited eating are emotional eating and external eating. Should disinhibited eating predict the tendency of bulimia nervosa? Are there existing behavioral differences between different levels of disinhibited eating among restrained eaters? Should they predict lower food intake under typical condition of self-regulatory resources depletion? These are questions the present research mainly concerned about.The present study adopted two methods (questionnaire investigation and behavioral experiment) to exam restrained eaters’overeating under conditions of typical self-regulatory depletion. We calculated the mean score of emotional eating and external eating from the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) to represent the disinhibited eating in the model test, and differentiate disinhibited eating leves of general restrained eaters in behavioral studies. In study1, we used structural equation model to test the original and extended dual pathway model among372Chinese young female students. Results showed that both models fitted. In the original model, only the negative affect pathway significantly predicted bulimia nervosa. In the extended model, the significant prediction of restrained eating to bulimia nervosa seems to run only via disinhibited eating. In sum, dual path way model demonstrated cross-cultural fitness. The original model and extended model concerned the risky factors lead to bulimia nervosa fitted well in the sample of Chinese female college students, restraint pathway significantly predicted bulimia nervosa symptom when added disinhibited eating as a mediator.In study2, we replicated the overeating of restraint eaters caused by depleted self-regulatory resources. Follow the2(self-regulatory resources depletion, self-regulatory resources intact)x2(restrained eaters, unrestrained eater) experimental design,61female participants (29restrained eaters,32unrestrained eaters) were instructed to watch a6-min voiceless neural video in which several neural words appeared in the bottom while eating M&M’s chocolate candies. Results showed that restraint eaters eat more food than unrestraint eaters when self-regulatory resources are depleted, but eat the same amount when self-regulatory resource is intact. Results indicate that depleted self-regulatory resource causes restraint eaters’overeating.In study3, we examine the difference of eating behavior between high disinhibited restrained eaters and low disinhibited restrained eaters under conditions of self-regulatory resource depletion. Follow the2(self-regulatory resources depletion, self-regulatory resources intact) x3(high disinhibited restrained eaters, low disinhibited restrained eaters, unrestrained eaters) experimental design,138female participants were instructed to watch a6-min voiceless neural video in which several neural words appeared in the bottom while eating M&M’s chocolate candies. Results showed that high disinhibited restrained eaters significantly ate more food than low disinhibited restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters when self-regulatory is depleted; no significant difference was found between three groups when self-regulatory resource is intact. Results suggested that high disinhibited restrained eaters are more likely to overeat when lack of self-regulatory resource, which indicates the higher risk of developing into disturbed eating behavior.The present study initially demonstrated the overeating behavior of restrained eaters under conditions of self-regulatory depletion. And it is the first study to test the mediate variable of disinhibited eating along the restraint pathway of dual pathway model. Theoretically, the present study is conducive to explore the inner mechanism of dieting failure of restrained eaters and enrich the prediction model of bulimia nervosa. Practically, the present study made contributes to providing pointed references to future intervening of eating disorder and other problematic eating behaviors.