Emotion dysregulation in eating and sleep disorders

Emotion dysregulation has been considered a risk factor for several disorders (e.g. Aldao et al., 2010), including eating disorders (ED) and insomnia: ED patients show higher difficulties in regulating emotions and greater experience of negative emotions (e.g. Harrison et al., 2009). As regards insomnia, previous evidence indicated that poor sleep is associated to higher level of emotion instability and greater experience of negative emotions (e.g. Baglioni et al., 2010). To these issues, three studies will be presented evidencing that: (1) both ED patients and people high in eating restriction show higher use of expressive suppression than a control group; (2) both people reporting full-blown and sub-syndromal sleep disorders show higher suppression than control groups; (3) emotion suppression predicts the co-occurrence of symptoms of ED and symptoms of insomnia in nonclinical samples. The role of emotion suppression will be discussed based on these sets of data.