Predicting eating attitudes and behaviors: the role of adverse childhood experiences, emotion regulation difficulty and emotional availability of parents

This thesis study aimed to investigate whether adverse childhood experiences, which were found to be a risk factor for developing eating disorders by several studies, would predict disordered eating attitudes through difficulties in emotion regulation and whether this relationship is moderated by parental emotional availability. The study sample was constructed with the convenience sampling method, and the data of 188 participants were included. Data were collected with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale (ACES), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-16), Lum Emotional Availability of Parents (LEAP), Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), and demographic information form. Data were analyzed by conducting moderated-mediation analysis, and it was found that difficulty in emotion regulation mediated the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and eating attitudes. However, after controlling for gender, age, and any history of psychological disorders, parental emotional availability did not moderate the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and eating attitudes and behaviors. Findings were further discussed within the scope of the literature.