Related Experiment Videos
Effects of coping style and negative body image on eating disturbance
Objective:
Relationships among coping strategies, negative body image, and eating disturbance were studied.
Method:
Subjects were 128 college women; measures included the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), and three indices of negative body image.
Results:
Higher use of both emotion-oriented coping and avoidance-oriented coping via distraction was associated with higher EAT scores; higher use of emotion-oriented coping also was associated with more negative body image. Findings agree with data associating these coping styles with other measures of psychological distress and psychopathology. Task-oriented coping also was high, but unrelated to negative body image or eating disturbance. Hierarchical regression analysis yielded a significant interaction between emotion-oriented coping and negative body image: The higher the use of emotion-oriented coping, the less the level of negative body image appeared to affect EAT score.
Discussion:
Both the main effect for coping and the interaction suggest that high use of emotion-oriented coping should be considered a risk factor for eating disturbance.