The Role of Emotion Regulation in Explaining Obese Adolescents' Emotional Eating Disorder: The Role of Mediator Mentalization

This study has been conducted with the aim of assessing the structural model of emotion regulating and emotional eating in obese individuals with mediating role of mentalization. The research method was descriptive and correlational. The statistical population of the study included all obese teenagers who were referred to diet therapy centers in Shiraz in 2021. Among them, 361 obese teenagers were chosen by convenient method, and filled in the emotional eating questionnaire (EEQ, Dutch, 1986), the children and teenagers emotional checklist (ERC, shield and kickty, 1997), and the mentalization questionnaire (MQ, Dimitrovi, 2017). Data analysis by structural equation modeling illustrated emotion regulating had a straight, significant relation with mentalization(p< 0/01), mentalization had a straight, negative but significant relationship with emotional eating(p< 0/01), and emotion regulating had a non-straight, negative but significant relationship with emotional eating(p< 0/01). The obtained results demonstrated that "emotion regulating" explains itself with the help of mentalization, and that the model had a good fit. Therefore the findings of the research could be used by health and psych experts.