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Disordered Eating, Anxiety 5
in hand with disordered eating and leads to poor coping behaviors, written emotional
disclosure may serve as a positive coping mechanism to relieve this underlying anxiety.
The risk factors for eating disorders—such as body dissatisfaction and negative
affect—would be especially targeted by a program such as written emotional disclosure.
Body dissatisfaction creates unnecessary anxiety that leads to poor eating habits as a way
to both adjust body weight and to escape the anxiety. Sloan and Marx (2004) found not
only a decrease in anxiety throughout the written emotional disclosure program, but
robust physical and psychological benefits as well. Negative affect is another risk factor
for eating disorders that would be targeted by this program. When anxiety concerning a
traumatic event—or simply a stressful lifestyle—is left unaddressed, an individual may
develop negative affect and refuse to address their emotions. These emotions could
manifest themselves in unhealthy relationships to food. Written emotional disclosure
would provide an outlet for these emotions, a decrease in negative affect, and a reduction
in eating disorder risk (Smyth, 1998).
Present Study
The purpose of this study is to provide a behavior-oriented prevention for eating
disorders. Anxiety is highly comorbid with eating disorders (Keel et al., 2005) and was
targeted in this study. Risk factors for eating disorders, such as body dissatisfaction and
negative affect, often lead to poor coping mechanisms to manage the anxiety that is often
shared with eating disorders (Stice, 2002). Written emotional disclosure will target these
risk factors (Norman et al., 2004) by providing a positive behavior to substitute for the
negative coping strategy of disordered eating that results from unchecked body
dissatisfaction and negative affect.
This study is innovative in that it explores a latent mediator, anxiety. First, anxiety
may play the role of mediator between written emotional disclosure and a decrease in
disordered eating behaviors. Second, this may occur because of a reduction in other
indicators of anxiety, such as negative affect and body dissatisfaction, because these may
also contribute to a decrease in eating pathology due to written emotional disclosure. It is
predicted that written emotional disclosure will lower anxiety, as measured by anxiety,
body dissatisfaction and negative affect, resulting in an overall decrease of disordered
eating.
Participants at risk for an eating disorder who were assigned to the written
emotional disclosure prevention were predicted to show a reduction in disordered eating
when compared to controls. It was also hypothesized that this reduction in disordered
eating will accompany a reduction in the latent mediator of anxiety, as indicated by a
reduction in anxiety, body dissatisfaction and/or negative affect (see Figure 1).