The Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology was organized around eight competency-focused work groups, as well as work groups on specialties and the assessment of competence. A diverse group of psychologists participated in this multisponsored conference. After describing the background and structure of the conference, this article reviews the common themes that surfaced across work groups, with attention paid to the identification, training, and assessment of competencies and competence. Recommendations to advance competency-based education, training, and credentialing in professional psychology are discussed. This is one of a series of articles published together in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Several other articles that resulted from the Competencies Conference will appear in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice and The Counseling Psychologist.

Criterion and concurrent validity of the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT) and the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI) were assessed in 82 women with bulimia nervosa. Both tests demonstrated criterion validity by discriminating bulimia nervosa subjects from normal subjects. However, only weak support was found for the concurrent validity within bulimia subjects. Generally there was little association between the EAT or the EDI and behavioral measures, including vomiting frequency, duration of disorder, eating during test meals, thoughts while eating, and body-size distortion. Self-report questionnaires in conjunction with direct behavioral-measures of eating and vomiting would provide the most complete assessment for bulimia nervosa.

This article provides an overview of issues, including identification of core competencies and strategies for training and assessment, related to ethics education and training for psychologists. It summarizes the products emerging from the ethics working group at the November 2002 Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology, held in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Bulimia can be separated into two major subtypes according to whether the individual does or does not couple binge eating with purging via vomiting or laxative abuse after eating. Twenty normal‐weight purging bulimic women were compared with 20 normal‐weight nonpurging bulimic women and 20 normal‐weight controls. Compared with the nonpurging bulimics, the purging bulimics showed greater anxiety about eating, disturbance on standardized measures of eating attitudes and disorders, body size distortion and desire to be thin, and disturbance on behavioral trait scales of the Eating Disorders Inventory. The nonpurging bulimics were never significantly more maladjusted than the purging bulimics on any measure although by comparison to normal controls, they exhibited more anxiety about eating, disturbance on eating disorder questionnaires, and depressive symptoms and lower self‐esteem. These results suggest that bulimia with purging is associated with a greater amount of psychopathology than bulimia without purging in normal‐weight women.

Body size estimation was studied in normal weight women with bulimia nervosa and a matched group of normal controls in order to determine whether bulimia nervosa patients overestimate their body size and whether they do so to a greater degree than women who are not suffering from an eating disorder. Estimation of five body locations was measured objectively with adjustable markers. Percentage of over‐ or underestimation was determined by the ratio of estimated to actual body size. Relative to control subjects, bulimia nervosa subjects significantly overestimated the size of their bust, waist, hips, and abdomen. Both groups overestimated the size of their face. Compared with previous studies of body size estimation in anorexia patients, the present study suggests that body size distortion might be less extreme in patients with bulimia nervosa.