Effects of coping style and negative body image on eating disturbance

✍ Scribed by Koff, Elissa ;Sangani, Purvi

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 179 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0276-3478
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-108x(199707)22:1<51::aid-eat6>3.0.co;2-1

✦ Synopsis

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.