ArticleAppetite2018
Sensory sensitivity mediates the relationship between anxiety and picky eating in children/ adolescents ages 8-17, and in college undergraduates: A replication and age-upward extension.
Article in Appetite, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Independent and Interactive Associations of Encopresis and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children on Emotional-Behavioral Symptoms, Executive Functioning, and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake-Related Symptoms.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- A correlational study of adult picky eating: proposing a developmental model.Journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- School-age somatic, internalizing, attention, and social difficulties in moderate anthropometric undernutrition: a primary-care case-control study.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Article
- Review
- Mediating effect of food disgust between depression/anxiety and avoidant restrictive eating.Journal of eating disorders · 2025Article
- Trajectories of childhood eating behaviors and their association with internalizing and externalizing symptoms in adolescence.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- Visual feature analysis on selective appetite in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.PloS one · 2025Article
- Lifetime and current mental health based on avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder history versus other eating disorder history in the Healthy Minds Study.The International journal of eating disorders · 2024Article
- Arousal and the modulation of sensory experience: evidence from food-related emotions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder: Review and Recent Advances.Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) · 2024Review
- Psychometric properties of the nine-item avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder screen (NIAS) in Turkish children.Journal of eating disorders · 2024Article
- Picky Eating in Childhood: Associations With Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms.Journal of pediatric psychology · 2022Article
- The lived experience of parenting a child with sensory sensitivity and picky eating.Maternal & child nutrition · 2022Article
- Article
- Conceptualizing and Measuring Appetite Self-Regulation Phenotypes and Trajectories in Childhood: A Review of Person-Centered Strategies.Frontiers in nutrition · 2021Review
- Characteristics of outpatients diagnosed with the selective/neophobic presentation of avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.The International journal of eating disorders · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study explores the relationships among anxiety, sensitivity to sensory stimuli, and picky eating (PE). An earlier study in 95 children ages 5-10 found that sensory sensitivity fully mediated the relationship between anxiety and picky eating. We replicated this finding in a sample of 158 children, ages 8-17, and in 813 young adult college students. As in the previous child sample, the relationship between anxiety and picky eating appears to be mediated by sensory sensitivity. This relationship extends into adolescence and young adulthood and holds even in a sample of children with obsessive-compulsive-spectrum and anxiety disorders. However, there may be developmental differences in the relationship between sensory sensitivity and PE; the magnitude of this relationship was significantly greater for children than young adults. Although there was a trend towards a stronger relationship in a subsample of young adults with high anxiety, the effect was still smaller than that observed in children, suggesting that this difference is developmental and not completely driven by higher anxiety in the child sample. Sensory sensitivity is a candidate mechanism of picky eating, although the cross-sectional nature of this study means that we cannot address whether it is an etiological or maintaining mechanism, or both. Implications for behavioral treatment of picky eating in clinically anxious and non-clinical samples are discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.