Emotion regulation and state body image during daily body-exposure situations: A pilot ecological momentary...

Emotion regulation has been consistently associated with eating disorder psychopathology, yet most evidence comes from retrospective and cross-sectional studies. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) allows these processes to be examined as they unfold during daily body-exposure situations. This pilot study investigated associations among emotion regulation strategies, affect, and state body image during naturally occurring body-exposure situations and explored whether average regulatory patterns across a two-week EMA period were associated with short-term change in drive for thinness.

Thirty-four young adults completed a 14-day EMA protocol combining event-based and end-of-day assessments. Event-level measures included state body image, positive and negative affect, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, and rumination. Drive for thinness was assessed at baseline and post-monitoring. Pearson correlations examined associations among participant-level averages, a linear mixed-effects model tested event-level associations, and multiple regression examined whether average emotion regulation variables were associated with post-monitoring drive for thinness after controlling for baseline scores.

Participants completed 305 EMA entries, corresponding to 64.08% adherence. More positive average body image was associated with higher positive affect and lower negative affect, expressive suppression, and rumination. At the event level, greater expressive suppression and rumination were associated with poorer state body image, whereas cognitive reappraisal was not. Baseline drive for thinness was significantly associated with post-monitoring scores. None of the EMA-derived emotion regulation variables was significantly associated with post-monitoring drive for thinness after controlling for baseline levels.

These preliminary findings suggest that expressive suppression and rumination may co-occur with poorer state body image during everyday body-salient situations. Larger EMA studies using parallel and validated measures of emotion regulation are needed to clarify these associations and their temporal relevance.