Abstract
Much research has been conducted to study the association between personality and eating disorders using clinical samples. However, less research has been done on personality variables in non-clinical cases of adolescents prone to binge eating. The purpose of this study is to compare a group of 53 adolescents without binge eating with a group of 28 adolescents with moderate binging behaviors and to investigate the relationship between personality traits and eating behaviors. All participants completed BES, STAY, EPQ-R, IVE and EDI-2. The results demonstrated that the group with moderate binging presented higher scores in state and trait anxiety, psychoticism, neuroticism, and impulsivity than the adolescents without binge eating. The second hypothesis of this research was to analyze the relationship between personality characteristics and eating behaviors. In the group of adolescents without binge eating both neuroticism and psychoticism correlated with ED symptomatology. Similarly extraversion, impulsivity and venturesomeness correlated with ED symptomatology. In the group of adolescents with moderate binge eating, there was an association of trait anxiety, extraversion, venturesomeness and empathy with ED symptomatology in university samples. The results of this study represent a new stimulus to thoroughly investigate those aspects of personality that may be predictive of ED symptomatology and to develop preventative strategies. It is our opinion that it is necessary to focus attention not only on clinical or non-clinical samples, but also on adolescents who could be considered at risk.
Highlights
Binge-eating disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive food consumption with experienced loss of control and marked distress but without the inappropriate compensatory behaviors of bulimia nervosa (BN) (Marcus and Wildes 2013)
Post hoc test performed with Bonferroni adjustments confirmed that the group with moderate binging presented higher scores in state anxiety (p < .001) and trait anxiety (p < .001) than the group without binging
In the group with moderate binging (Table 3), the analysis showed no significant correlations between eating behaviors and neuroticism
Summary
Binge-eating disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive food consumption with experienced loss of control and marked distress but without the inappropriate compensatory behaviors of bulimia nervosa (BN) (Marcus and Wildes 2013). There is a wide range of scientific literature that proposes an explanation of the relationship between eating disorders and personality characteristics. Cuzzocrea et al SpringerPlus (2015) 4:593 studies have looked primarily at clinical sampling and in particular have studied adolescents diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. For this reason, it is difficult to summarize the characteristics of risk and protective factor for BED. The review proposed by Pearlstein (2002) demonstrated how the characteristics of clinical patients were heterogeneous some overlapping exists in that risk factors cannot be transmitted across subtypes of eating pathologies
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