īody dissatisfaction has become increasingly common among women and young adults and has only become worse in the digital age, where people have increased access to social media and are in constant competition and comparisons with their “friends” on their different social media platforms. These findings confirm that the non-verbal behavior assessment provides complementary information to those derived from traditional measurements and suggests research and clinical implications.Įvidence obtained from experimental study. Women with EDs showed a hostile and freezing response to acute psycho-social stress: reduced submissiveness and flight may represent strategies to manage social anxiety. In this population, cortisol reactivity was also positively associated with submissiveness and negatively with gesture.
Submissiveness and flight behaviors were negatively associated with stress-induced anxiety, while TSST-induced anxiety and cortisol increases were positively associated with looking at the other’s face behavior in participants with EDs. Women with EDs showed reduced submissiveness, flight (cutoff from social stimuli) and gesture compared to healthy peers during TSST. Multivariate regression analyses were performed to assess the association between anxiety, cortisol and behavioral responses to TSST. Non-verbal behaviors were analyzed through the Ethological Coding System for Interviews and were compared between study samples through multivariate analysis of variance. Throughout the procedure, anxiety feelings were measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory state subscale and saliva samples were collected to evaluate cortisol levels. Thirty-one women suffering from EDs (13 with anorexia nervosa and 18 with bulimia nervosa) and 15 healthy women underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), the paradigm of psycho-social stress, and were videotaped. This study objectively assessed non-verbal behaviors of individuals with EDs in a psycho-social stress scenario. Findings provide insight into the mechanisms by which different motivations relate to distinct eating outcomes and suggest that promoting eating quality may be more beneficial for adopting healthy eating behaviors.Įvidence that social difficulties promote the development and the maintenance of eating disorders (EDs) derive from self-reported data and only partially from experimental tasks. In contrast, controlled motivation was positively associated with planning and self-monitoring eating quantity, and these strategies were then positively associated with bulimic symptoms. Autonomous motivation was positively associated with planning and self-monitoring eating quality, and these strategies were then positively and negatively associated with healthy and unhealthy eating, respectively. Study 2 (n = 979) replicated the results within structural equation models. Study 1 (n = 456) examined whether the strategies could account for additional variance in eating outcomes beyond the influence of motivation, and whether the strategies mediated the relationships between motivation and eating. The goal of this study was to examine whether strategies such as planning and self-monitoring the quality/quantity of eating can explain the relationships between autonomous and controlled motivation and eating in undergraduate female students.