In recent years, there has been a growing focus on early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) as core features associated with eating psychopathology. The aims of the present study were to assess in overweight and obese women: (i) the association between dysfunctional eating patterns (i.e., food addiction and binge eating) and EMSs, and (ii) the association between food addiction and EMSs after controlling for potential confounding variables (i.e., binge eating severity and psychopathology). Participants were 70 overweight and obese women seeking low-energy-diet therapy. The patients were administered self-report measures investigating food addiction, binge eating, EMSs, anxiety symptoms, and depressive symptoms. Food addiction severity was strongly associated with all main schema domains. Binge eating severity was positively related to disconnection/rejection (r = 0.41; p < 0.01), impaired limits (r = 0.26; p < 0.05), and other-directedness domains (r = 0.27; p < 0.05). The disconnection/rejection schema was independently associated with food addiction severity, after controlling for the presence of other potential confounding variables (i.e., binge eating severity and psychopathology) suggesting that this domain may be a crucial factor for the development of food addiction.

A general personality and psychopathology evaluation is considered to be crucial part of the multidisciplinary assessment for weight-related problems. The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) is commonly used to assess general psychopathology in both overweight and obese patients seeking weight-loss treatment. The main purpose of the present research was to investigate the psychometric properties of the brief form of the SCL-90-R (i.e., the SCL-K-9) in a clinical sample (N = 397) of patients seeking weight-loss treatment (i.e., bariatric surgery and a nutritional weight-loss program). The results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported a one-factor solution of the SCL-K-9, with all nine items loading significantly on the common latent factor (lambdas ≥ 0.587). The ordinal α (= 0.91), the inter-item mean indices of correlation (r_ii = 0.53), and the convergent validity were also satisfactory. A receiver operating characteristic curves procedure showed that both SCL-90-R and SCL-K-9 were able to classify patients with and without significant binge eating pathology according to the Binge Eating Scale (BES) total score. Overall, our results suggest that the SCL-K-9 has adequate psychometric properties and can be applied as a short screening tool to assess general psychopathology in overweight/obese individuals seeking weight-loss treatment and at follow-up interviews when time restraints preclude the use of the full-length form.