the relationship between covid-related psychological distress and perceived stress with emotional eating in iranian adolescents: the mediating role of emotion dysregulation

Objective: the unprecedented nature of the covid-19 pandemic and cessation of full faceto-face affiliation along with homebound restrictions have caused a variety of psychologicaldistress among adolescents. adolescents vary in the way they perceive such stressors and somerespond with eating disturbances, which could reflect their dysfunctional emotion regulationstrategies. the present research aimed at elucidating potential mediating pathways fromperceived stress and psychological distress to emotional eating.methods: this cross-sectional study was composed of 292 adolescents who were assessed usingthe perceived stress scale, covid-19-related psychological stress scale, emotional eatingsubscale of the dutch eating behavior questionnaire, and difficulties in emotion regulationscale. correlation analyses were performed to assess the relationship between variables. anovawas conducted to detect differences between males and females for emotional eating. then, amediation analysis was conducted to assess whether emotional dysregulation was a mediatorbetween psychological distress and emotional eating.results: results of path analyses indicated that a model with perceived stress and psychologicaldistress predicting emotion eating through the mediation of emotion dysregulation was the best fitfor the data (cfi=0.970, gfi=0.949, df=26, χ2=53.69, χ2/df=2.06, p>0.05, and rmsea=0.069).mediation analyses showed the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the link betweenperceived stress and emotional eating (sobel’s z=2.83, p<0.05) while, it could not function as amediator between psychological distress and emotional eating (sobel’s z=0.90, p>0.05).conclusion: this study contributes to our understanding of the role of emotion regulation in therelationship between perceived stress and psychological distress and emotional eating in adolescentsduring the covid-19 pandemic. the implication of this study is for therapeutic intervention totarget emotional dysregulation of adolescents confronted with covid-19 stressors.