BACKGROUND We studied associations between emotion dysregulation, self-image and eating disorder (ED) symptoms in university women, and contrasted two indirect effect models to examine possible intervening mechanisms to produce ED symptoms. METHODS 252 female Swedish university students completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), the Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (...

Stress causes or contributes to a huge variety of diseases and disorders. Recent evidence suggests obesity and other eating-related disorders may be among these. Immediately after a stressful event is experienced, there is a corticotropin-releasing-hormone (CRH)-mediated suppression of food intake. This diverts the body's resources away from the less pressing need to find and consume food, prio...

Proximal objects provide affordances that activate the motor information involved in interacting with the objects. This effect has previously been shown for artifacts but not for natural objects, such as food. This study examined whether the sight of proximal food, compared to distant food activates eating-related information. In two experiments reaction times to verbal labels following the sig...

Dysphagia is a frequent cause of referral for oesophageal manometry although the motor response to eating is not routinely studied. We examined symptoms and oesophageal motor patterns in response to eating bread in 30 patients with either gastro-oesophageal reflux (n = 20), or normal oesophageal function tests (n = 10). No patient experienced symptoms while swallowing water but one complained o...

Animal studies suggest a relationship between blunted HPA-axis stress reactivity and increased stress-induced food intake in chronically stressed animals. Such a relationship can potentially explain the underlying mechanisms of emotional eating in humans. However, no studies have experimentally tested the relationship between stress-induced cortisol responses and acute food intake in high and l...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore brain responses to food images in overweight humans, examining independently the impact of a prescan meal ("satiety") and the anti-obesity drug sibutramine, a serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor. We identified significantly different responses to these manipulations in amygdala, hypothalamus, and ventral striatum. Each region w...

BACKGROUND Body representation disturbances in body schema (i.e. unconscious sensorimotor body representations for action) have been frequently reported in eating disorders. Recently, it has been proposed that body schema relies on adequate functioning of the motor system, which is strongly implicated in discriminating between one's own and someone else's body. The present study aimed to invest...