ORIGINAL ARTICLE Psychometric properties of the Italian Yale Food Addiction Scale in overweight and obese patients Marco Innamorati • Claudio Imperatori • Gian Mauro Manzoni • Dorian A. Lamis • Gianluca Castelnuovo • Antonino Tamburello • Stella Tamburello • Mariantonietta Fabbricatore Received: 24 April 2014 / Accepted: 10 July 2014 / Published online: 29 July 2014 Ó Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Abstract Aim To assess the dimensionality and psychometric properties of an Italian version of the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) in a sample of obese/overweight patients attending low-energy diet therapy. Methods Participants were 300 overweight and obese patients who were admitted to a private medical center in Rome, Italy. Controls were 300 (231 women and 69 men) adults from the general population. All of the participants were administered the YFAS and the binge eating scale (BES). Results The one-factor model of the YFAS reported in previous studies did not fit the data [v 2 209 = 466.69, p \ 0.001, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.07; 90 % CI: 0.06/0.08; comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.91; weighted root mean square residual (WRMR) = 1.40]. Through item analysis, it was suggested that five items (items #10, #11, #22, #24, and #25) with low item–total correlations should be removed from the mea- sure. A 16-item one-factor model revealed a better fit to the data (v 2 104 = 174.56; p \ 0.001; RMSEA = 0.05; 90 % CI: 0.04/0.07; CFI = 0.96), although the WRMR was slightly higher than that suggested as an indicator of good fit (WRMR = 1.01). The YFAS-16 had satisfactory inter- nal consistency; it was able to discriminate obese patients from controls and strongly correlated with BES scores. Conclusion The YFAS-16 assesses all of the ‘‘symp- toms’’ represented in the original version and has satis- factory psychometric properties, although the percentage of food addiction diagnoses according to the YFAS-16 is lower than the percentage of diagnoses according to the original version of the questionnaire. Keywords Yale Food Addiction Scale Á Obesity Á Overweight Á Structural equation modeling Introduction The construct of ‘‘food addiction’’ (FA) has been introduced in the last decades to better understand abnormal eating patterns among obese and overweight individuals [1, 2]. In fact, a large body of literature has documented the paral- lelism between addictive behaviors and obesity in both M. Innamorati (&) Á C. Imperatori Á A. Tamburello Á S. Tamburello Á M. Fabbricatore Universita ` Europea di Roma, via degli Aldobrandeschi 190, 00163 Rome, Italy e-mail: innamorati.marco@libero.it M. Innamorati Á C. Imperatori Á A. Tamburello Á S. Tamburello Á M. Fabbricatore Istituto Skinner, via Nazionale 163, 00184 Rome, Italy G. M. Manzoni Faculty of Psychology, eCampus University, Novedrate, Como, Italy G. M. Manzoni Á G. Castelnuovo SISDCA, Italian Society for the Study of Eating Disorders, Rome, Italy D. A. Lamis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, USA G. Castelnuovo Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy G. Castelnuovo Istituto Auxologico Italiano IRCCS, Psychology Research Laboratory, Ospedale San Giuseppe, Verbania, Italy 123 Eat Weight Disord (2015) 20:119–127 DOI 10.1007/s40519-014-0142-3