Psychological need satisfaction, control, and disordered eating

Abstract

Our results indicate that young women with chronically unfulfilled basic psychological needs might be vulnerable to developing disordered eating behaviours. The observed patterns suggest that persistent experience of need frustration may engender an internal sense of ineffectiveness and lack of control, which then compels individuals to engage in disordered eating behaviours in an attempt to regain autonomy and competence. Interventions for eating disorders may be most effective when emphasizing the promotion of people's needs for autonomy and competence. Limitations The model was constructed using cross-sectional data. Future experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to confirm the temporal sequence from basic psychological needs to issues of control. The sample only consisted of young women. Further research should explore how thwarting of psychological need satisfaction functions in men. Our clinical sample was small and diagnosis was not confirmed through clinical interview; therefore, those data should be interpreted with caution.

Risk and resiliency factors related to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating: The identity disruption model

“…Fourth, the MTurk sample used in the present study might not be generalizable to the population as a whole. Note, however, that previous research has found similarities in the factors that are associated with body dissatisfaction/disordered eating in MTurk samples, student samples, and community samples (Froreich, Vartanian, Zawadzki, Grisham, & Touyz, ; Vartanian et al, ). Finally, the current study focused on associations with disordered eating, but it is possible that the model described in this paper has broad applicability to a range of psychopathologies.…”

The stigma of clean dieting and orthorexia nervosa

“…Participants were adult women based in the United States who were recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website. MTurk is an online data collection method that has been shown to produce data that are comparable in quality and reliability to those provided by student and community samples [ 28 , 29 ]. Individuals who are registered with MTurk have access to a range of tasks that they can complete for small monetary incentives.…”

Behavioral functions underlying NSSI and eating disorder behaviors

“…Some risk factors that are shared between these behaviors are more pertinent for one or the other, and this pattern may extend to the functions of the behaviors. For example, depressive and anxiety symptoms are elevated in both NSSI and ED populations, but are more strongly predictive of NSSI than of ED behaviors (Muehlenkamp et al, ; Vansteelandt et al, ), which instead tend to be preceded by interpersonal stressors and a need to regain or exert control (Froreich, Vartanian, Zawadzki, Grisham, & Touyz, ; Razenhofer et al, ). These findings tentatively suggest that emotional regulation functions may be more salient motivators for NSSI compared to ED behaviors, and social functions may be more relevant to motivating ED behavior but the lack of research explicitly testing this comparison makes it hard to draw definitive conclusions.…”