Testing the original and the extended dual-pathway model of lack of control over eating: a two-year longitudinal study

Introduction: the dual pathway model of Stice proposed a mediational sequence that link body dissatisfaction to lack of control over eating through dietary restraint and negative affect. Recently van Strien and colleagues extended the negative affect pathway of the original dual pathway model by adding two additional intervening variables: interoceptive deficits and emotional eating. The purpose of this study was to test and compare the original and extended model using prospective data. Methods: data collected from 361 adolescent girls, who were interviewed and completed self-report measures annually in a 2-year period, were analysed using structural equation modelling. Both forms of sense of loss of control over eating (i.e., subjective and objective binge eating) were evaluated. Results: although both models provided a good fit to the data, the extended model accounted for a greater proportion of variance in binge eating than the origin al model. All proposed mediational pathways of both models have been supported and all indirect effects examined through bootstrap procedure were significant. Conclusions: the associations between negative affect and interoceptive deficits, and interoceptive deficits and emotional eating were significantly stronger for overweight/obese than for normal weight girls. Although our results confirmed the validity of both models and extended previous findings with older samples to an early- to middle adolescent group, the bi-directional relationship between dietary restraint and negative affect suggest that theassociation among these key risk factors for binge eating are more complex than outlined in both the original and extended dual-pathway models.