Examination of Emotion-Focused Therapy for Emotional Avoidance in Binge Eating

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Reichenberger
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553716226

Binge-Eating Disorder (BED) is marked by binge eating episodes in which an individual overeats and experiences a loss of control. Individuals with BES also exhibit a broad variety of emotional disturbances: higher negative affect, alexithymia, negative urgency, and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Research showed that negative affect can trigger binge eating - so called emotional eating - to downregulate the negative emotion (i.e., regulation). However, previous research questions the validity of emotional eating and we propose that another mechanism might occur. Because of the marked emotional disturbances, individuals with BES might also use binge eating to avoid negative emotions (i.e., avoidance). Current therapies aiming at reducing binge eating, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, do not account for such avoidance patterns. Hence, the current study aims to a) assess these two different trajectories of emotion-related binge eating episodes (i.e., regulation vs. avoidance) and b) experimentally manipulate emotional avoidance and processing through emotion-focused therapy (EFT) in individuals with BED and examine its effect on these avoidance patterns. Through 10 sessions of EFT, the intervention group (50 individuals with BED) is hypothesized to reduce binge eating frequency, emotional eating and emotional disturbances compared to a waitlist control group (50 individuals with BED without treatment). Outcomes will be examined with various methodologies, namely psychometric (i.e., Salzburg Emotional Eating Scale), experimental (i.e., food picture viewing task after negative emotion induction) and naturalistic data (i.e., smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) daily across 10 weeks measuring emotions and eating behavior). Regarding mechanisms, we hypothesize that clustering of EMA data will result in two distinct groups of individuals with different emotion trajectories surrounding binge eating episodes. Additionally, we expect changes between a 7-day pre- and post-EMA in the intervention group only and especially in individuals with a predominant pattern of emotional avoidance.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants