Associations of children’s Big Five personality with eating behaviors

OBJECTIVE: Our aim is to examine the associations of the Big Five personality factors with eating behaviors in children using a cross-sectional study in 1543 randomly Norwegian 7–12 year olds. RESULTS: Mothers rated the hierarchical personality inventory for children, and the child eating behaviour questionnaire to describe her child. Personality and eating behaviors were substantially associated in bivariate correlations and multivariate analyses of variance. The strongest predictors of eating behaviors were neuroticism, followed by agreeableness and conscientiousness. Neuroticism correlated the highest with slow eating, emotional undereating, food responsiveness, and emotional overeating, and showed minor associations with satiety responsiveness, and fussiness. Neuroticism was not associated with enjoyment of food. Agreeableness was associated with low fussiness, low emotional undereating, low food responsiveness and low emotional overeating, conscientiousness was associated with low satiety responsiveness, and food responsiveness, and extraversion and imagination were associated with high enjoyment of food.