Attributional Style in the Eating Disorders

Abstract

Previous research has shown that patients with eating disorders have a characteristic cognitive bias, making internal attributions when evaluating negative events. However, there is less clarity about their attributions for positive events. There are suggestions that this cognitive style might be influenced by depressed mood. This study examines attributional style in the eating disorders for positive and negative events, independent of covariant effects of depression. Twenty-five eating-disordered women and 26 nonclinical women each completed measures of attributional style, depressed mood, and eating pathology. They also completed a measure of verbal intelligence (to ensure comparability of groups). Women with an eating disorder had a greater tendency to attribute negative situations to the self when compared with nonclinical women, even when differences in depressed mood were controlled for. There were no comparable differences in positive attributional biases. Women with an eating disorder adopt a self-blaming style when evaluating negative events, and such self-blame is likely to contribute to the maintenance of an eating disorder. This suggests that therapy for the eating disorders should include an element that focuses on highlighting and re-evaluating such interpretations.

The relation of body dissatisfaction to salience of particular body sizes

“…Our findings are similar to research on attentional differences in anxious and depressed individuals which shows that these individuals tend to focus more on depressive or threatening stimuli (42, 43), as well as consistent with research on maladaptive attributions for life events in those with eating disorders (12, 44). Similarly, individuals with large degrees of body dissatisfaction may engage in fewer social comparisons with obese individuals, which could lead to a perpetuation of their negative feelings about their bodies.…”

“…There are a variety of cognitive biases centered around attention to weight and eating information (e.g., 9, 10, 11), attributions for life events (e.g., 12) which may be related to likelihood of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating [for a review see (13)]. Recent work implicates body image schemas (generalized knowledge structures similar to self-schemas that contain information about one's shape and weight) as a contributing factor in body dissatisfaction because of the way that they direct some individuals' attention toward appearance-related information and stimuli (14-19).…”

The Role of Emotional Abuse in the Eating Disorders: Implications for Treatment

“…Given that ED patients share the depressive individual's attributional style for negative events (e.g., Morrison, Waller, & Lawson, 2006), the patient who has experienced early and lifelong emotional abuse is likely to attribute these abusive experiences in the ways outlined above-internally ("My parents told me that they hated me because I am unlovable"), globally ("Everyone treated me like dirt"), and stably ("I will never be liked"). Through cognitive restructuring and behavioral experiments (Waller, Kennerly, & Ohanian, 2007), the aim is to help the individual to identify evidence that his/her experiences can be attributed to others, such as the abuser (i.e., external attribution of the negative event), that they apply to a limited element of his/her life (i.e., local attribution), and that they applied in the past but not now (i.e., unstable attribution).…”

Cognitions and Emotions in Eating Disorders

“…ED patients responded more with positive weight and shape interpretations when the scenarios related to others. Thus, ED patients judge weight and shape to be a more likely explanation for events with a negative outcome and referring to themselves (Cooper 1997;Morrison et al 2006). Jansen et al (2007) showed that this was also true for overweight and obese children.…”