TY - JOUR A1 - Koch, Anne A1 - Pollatos, Olga T1 - Reduced facial emotion recognition in overweight and obese children JF - Journal of psychosomatic research N2 - Objective: Emotional problems often co-occur in overweight or obese children. However, questions of whether emotion recognition deficits are present and how they are reflected have only been sparsely investigated to date. Methods: Therefore, the present study included 33 overweight and obese as well as 33 normal weight elementary school children between six and ten years that were matched for sex, age and socioeconomic status. Participants were shown different emotional faces of a well-validated set of stimuli on a computer screen, which they categorized and then rated on an emotional intensity level. Key measures were categorization performance along with reaction times and emotional intelligence as well as emotional eating questionnaire ratings. Results: Overweight children exhibited lower categorization accuracy as well as longer reaction times as compared to normal weight children, while no differences in intensity ratings occurred. Reaction time to neutral facial expressions was negatively related to intrapersonal and interpersonal emotional intelligence and emotional eating correlated negatively with accuracy for recognizing sad expressions. Conclusion: Facial emotion decoding difficulties seem to be of importance in overweight and obese children and deserve further consideration in terms of their exact impact on social functioning as well as on the maintenance of elevated body weight during child development. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved. KW - Childhood obesity KW - Emotion KW - Emotional expressions KW - Face categorization KW - Overweight Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2015.06.005 SN - 0022-3999 SN - 1879-1360 VL - 79 IS - 6 SP - 635 EP - 639 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - THES A1 - Koch, Anne T1 - Körperwahrnehmung und emotionales Erleben BT - ihre korrelative und prädiktive Bedeutung für Körpergewicht und Essverhalten im Grundschulalter Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koch, Anne A1 - Pollatos, Olga T1 - Interoceptive sensitivty, body weight and eating behavior in children: a prospective study JF - Frontiers in psychology KW - body weight KW - children KW - eating behavior KW - heartbeat perception KW - interoceptive sensitivity KW - overweight Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01003 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 5 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koch, Anne A1 - Matthias, Ellen A1 - Pollatos, Olga T1 - Increased Attentional Bias towards Food Pictures in Overweight and Obese Children JF - Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior N2 - Objective: Childhood overweight is related to higher sensitivity for external food cues and less responsiveness towards internal satiety signals. Thus, cognitive psychological models assume an enhanced food attention bias underlying overeating behavior. Nevertheless, this question has only been sparsely investigated so far in younger children and it remains open whether restrained eating behavior plays a correlative role. Methods: The present study investigated this specific information processing bias for food relevant stimuli in 34 overweight children between 6 and 10 years and 34 normal weight children matched for age, sex and socioeconomic status. Children completed a computerized Food Picture Interference task that assessed reaction time interference effects towards high and low calorie food pictures. Level of hunger and restrained eating were assessed via self-report. Results: Results indicated that while finding no group difference in general processing speed or hunger level before the task, overweight children showed a higher attentional bias to food pictures than normal weight children. No effect of caloric density was found. However, surprisingly, the interference effect was negatively related to restrained eating in the overweight group only. Conclusion: The found hypersensitivity for food cues independent of calorie content in overweight children appears to be related to dysfunctional eating, so that future research should consider strategies for attentional retraining. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4172/2375-4494.1000130 SN - 2375-4494 VL - 2 IS - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koch, Anne A1 - Pollatos, Olga T1 - Cardiac sensitivity in children: Sex differences and its relationship to parameters of emotional processing JF - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research N2 - In adults, the level of ability to perceive one's own body signals plays an important role for many concepts of emotional experience as demonstrated for emotion processing or emotion regulation. Representative data on perception of body signals and its emotional correlates in children is lacking. Therefore, the present study investigated the cardiac sensitivity of 1,350 children between 6 and 11 years of age in a heartbeat perception task. Our main findings demonstrated the distribution of cardiac sensitivity in children as well as associations with interpersonal emotional intelligence and adaptability. Furthermore, independent of body mass index, boys showed a significantly higher cardiac sensitivity than girls. We conclude that cardiac sensitivity in children appears to show weaker but similar characteristics and relations to emotional parameters as found in adults, so that a dynamic developmental process can be assumed. KW - Children KW - Emotional intelligence KW - Heartbeat perception KW - Heart rate variability KW - Interoceptive sensitivity Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12233 SN - 0048-5772 SN - 1469-8986 VL - 51 IS - 9 SP - 932 EP - 941 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER -