Evaluation of social cognitive skills in 12-18 year-old adolescents diagnosed with binge eating disorder and exogenous obesity, and also comprasion with healthy control

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the theory of mind (ToM) ability in a sample of obese adolescent patients with and without binge eating disorder (BED), to explore the correlations between emotional and clinical assessments and compare the results between the patient groups and healthy controls. Method: Overall, 32 non-BED, 32 BED obese patients and 64 healthy control completed a battery of tests assessing social cognition and eating disorder psychopathology. Results: The results substantiate the initial working hypothesis that poorer performance in emotional recognition would be greater in both Binge eating disorder and non-BED obese patients as compared to controls. Various correlations were evident between depression, emotional regulation problems, eating attitudes and patterns. Conclusion: Binge eating disorder and non-BED obese patients showed an impairment in affective ToM, dependent of their clinical status. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate both emotional recognition and emotion regulation functions in these BED adolescents patients between 12 and 18 years of age.