BackgroundIrritability is a distressing and disabling transdiagnostic symptom of emotion dysregulation. Despite some obvious links between irritability and eating behaviours this relationship is rarely studied.AimsWe examined longitudinal associations between eating behaviours and irritability in young adulthood. We measured people’s tendencies to approach food (e.g. higher sensitivity to hunger, higher responsiveness to food) and to avoid food (e.g. undereating in emotional contexts, food fussiness) and compared their associations with irritability.MethodsWe used data from a British birth cohort (the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), and employed a structural equation modelling framework to investigate the dimensional structure of eating behaviours at age 23 and their longitudinal associations with irritability at age 25. We ran analyses with both full information maximum likelihood and multiple imputation by chained equations to handle missing data. We also ran models which controlled for baseline depression symptoms.ResultsOur sample comprised 4188 participants with data on eating behaviours at age 23 (65% female). We found that behaviours related to both approaching food (b = 0.12, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.08-0.17) and to avoiding food (b = 0.08, 95% CI = 0.04-0.12) were associated with irritability. In additional analyses, we found that constraining these two coefficients to be equal did not result in meaningfully worse model fit; suggesting that individuals who tend to approach food and individuals who tend to avoid food are at similar risk for elevated irritability. Controlling for baseline depression symptoms resulted in reduced associations for both food approach (b = 0.07, 95% CI = 0.03-0.12) and food avoidance behaviours (b = 0.03, 95% CI = 0.00-0.07).ConclusionEating behaviours are longitudinally associated with higher irritability and may represent an overlooked pathway to emotion dysregulation.