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Associations among fear, disgust, and eating pathology in undergraduate men and women
Anderson et al. (2018) write that while fear and disgust are separate emotions both previously linked with eating disorders, it is possible that one is more strongly associated with eating disorders than the other. This study therefore aimed to discover the relative importance of fear and disgust in accounting for variance in eating disorder symptoms. Undergraduate men and women were recruited from a university in the northeastern United States and evaluated on disordered eating attitudes and behaviors, as well as fear and disgust responses to high-calorie food images, low-calorie food images, and non-food fear and disgust images. There were significant positive associations identified among fear, disgust, and EDE-Q global symptom scores (a measure of eating disorder psychopathology). Relative weight analysis results suggested that a disgust response to high calorie food images accounts for the greatest total variance in EDE-Q global symptom scores in men, while a fear response to high calorie food images accounts for the greatest total variance in EDE-Q scores in women. To conclude, there may be reasons to consider fear and disgust as two aspects of negative affect with different patterns of relative importance to eating disorder symptoms. [NPID: emotions, binge eating, fear, disgust, eating disorders]
Year: 2018
