Abstract
<p>Binge eating has been linked to alterations in interoceptive awareness, self-regulation, and hedonic responsiveness to food, yet the mechanisms connecting these domains remain incompletely understood. The present study examined differences in interoceptive awareness, executive functioning, and hedonic responsiveness to food across levels of binge-eating severity in a community sample of adults. Participants completed self-report measures assessing multidimensional interoceptive awareness, executive functioning, and food reward sensitivity, as well as a battery of neuropsychological tasks evaluating inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and decision-making. Structural equation modeling was used to compare five theoretically grounded alternative models describing the relationships among these constructs. Individuals with higher binge-eating severity showed greater hedonic responsiveness to food cues, higher levels of negative urgency, reduced perseverance, and greater self-reported executive difficulties, alongside lower interoceptive awareness across several dimensions. In contrast, performance-based neuropsychological tasks did not reliably differentiate binge-eating severity groups. Binge-eating severity was associated with hedonic food responsiveness both directly and indirectly through reduced interoceptive awareness and self-regulatory dysfunction. These findings suggest that binge-eating severity may be more strongly related to subjective and experiential aspects of self-regulation and bodily awareness than to deficits detected through classical neuropsychological tasks and point to interoceptive awareness as a transdiagnostic mechanism through which binge-eating severity may amplify hedonic food responsiveness via self-regulatory dysfunction.</p>