Body mass index and emotion recognition in young adulthood and its association with executive functioning

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Obesity is a serious health condition that also a risk factor for socio-emotional challenges and medical problems. Preliminary evidence suggests obesity may also be associated with difficulty in accurately identifying emotions, particularly negative emotions. In addition, poor emotion recognition has been linked to weaker executive functioning skills, which is a common challenge in obesity. The direct relationship between body mass index (BMI) and emotion recognition is poorly understood in young adults and warrants further exploration. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that 1) after controlling for sociodemographic, clinical, and executive functioning variables and that 2) BMI would be negatively associated with emotion recognition accuracy for negative emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, and fear) but not positive emotions. METHODS: Using a subset of the Human Connectome Project dataset (N=799), we conducted a hierarchal linear regression (HLR) to test the relationship between overall emotion recognition and the following predictors, adding in steps: 1) sociodemographic and clinical variables, 2) executive functioning variables, and 3) BMI. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, BMI was not significantly associated with overall emotion recognition accuracy. Instead, Hispanic ethnicity, greater cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort task), and larger working memory (List Sorting Working Memory Test) was associated with better overall emotion recognition accuracy. Similarly, these same dimensions, as well as being female, was associated with better negative emotion recognition accuracy.