The Relationship of emotion regulation difficulties and hedonic hunger situations with food addiction: a study on health professionals

Abstract

Aim: This study was to evaluate emotion regulation difficulties and hedonic hunger situations in healthcare workers and examine the relationship with food addiction. Method: A questionnaire consisting of demographic characteristics, Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), Power of Food Scale (PFS) and Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) was administered to participants and analyzed in SPSS v26. A total of 671 healthcare workers, 465 females and 206 males, participated in the study and the mean age of the participants was 34,6910,11 years, mean body mass index was 23.97±3.24 kg/m2. Results: It was found that a significantly increase in the score of healthcare workers DERS-16 increases the score of YFAS and an increase score of PFS increases the score of YFAS. It was found that significantly as the “YFAS Total” scores of the healthcare workers increased, the “Clarity”, “Goals” sub-factor scores of DERS-16 and “DERS-16 Total” scores and the “Food Present”, “Food Available”, “Food Tasted” sub-factor of PFS and “PFS Total” scores increased. Conclusion: As the emotion regulation difficulties and hedonic hunger scores increased, the food addiction scores increased.