Relationship among Eating Behavior, Effortful Control, and Personality Traits in Japanese Students: Cross-sectional Study

Purpose: Effortful control is the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform instead a subdominant response. The Big Five personality traits have been widely used to describe personality in terms of five independent factors. In this study, we investigated the relationships among eating behavior, personality, and effortful control in Japanese university students.

Methods: Participants were 576 Japanese university students (422 males and 154 females). Participants completed a questionnaire measuring effortful control, Big Five personality traits, and eating behaviors.

Results: Restrained eating was positively associated with effortful control in both males and females whereas emotional eating and external eating were negatively associated with effortful control in both genders. Extraversion was positively associated with emotional eating and external eating, whereas other indicators of the Big Five personality traits were negatively associated with emotional eating and external eating.

Conclusion: Our results indicate that eating behaviors are associated with both effortful control and the Big Five personality traits. However, the direction of the associations of effortful control and Big Five personality traits with restrained eating differed from the associations of effortful control and personality with emotional eating and external eating.