Mediators of the association between abuse and disordered eating in undergraduate men
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 168 undergraduate male volunteers from Psychology classes at a large southeastern university. In addition to the measures described below, participants completed a demographic questionnaire. They represented the following ethnic/racial groups: 54.2% Caucasian, 26.2% African-American, 10.7% Asian-American/Asian, and 3.6% Latino/Hispanic; 4.2% reported that they belonged to another ethnic or racial group, and 1.2% did not report their ethnicity. With respect to year in school,
Descriptive statistics
Means, standard deviations, and correlations of all measures used in this study are presented in Table 1.
Prior to testing the main hypotheses of the study, we examined the prevalence of childhood abuse in our sample. Although the CTQ is scored on a 5-point scale and these polytomous scores were used in all analyses, the number of participants endorsing at least one item on each CTQ subscale was calculated in order to evaluate the frequency of each abuse type. Emotional neglect was the most
Discussion
These results add to the literature by assessing EDs and a range of associated psychological symptoms in men, as well as mediating and moderating relationships among these variables. Furthermore, these findings underscore the need for inclusion of men in studies of disordered eating. Although men and women suffering from EDs evidence similar symptomatology (e.g., Eliot & Baker, 2001), correlates of ED behaviors in men may differ. In the current study, only physical abuse and physical neglect
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by NIH Grant MH-068520. A version of this paper was presented at the annual Eating Disorders Research Society meeting in Amsterdam, Netherlands. We gratefully acknowledge Melanie Bean and Cynthia M. Bulik for their comments on a previous version of this Article.
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