Development and validation of a multifactorial treatment outcome measure for eating disorders.

The purpose of this investigation was to develop a brief self-report inventory which could be used to evaluate treatment outcome for anorexia and bulimia nervosa. The Multifactorial Assessment of Eating Disorders Symptoms (MAEDS) was constructed to measure six symptom clusters which have been found to be central to the eating disorders: depression, binge eating, purgative behavior, fear of fatness, restrictive eating, and avoidance of forbidden foods. The factor structure of the MAEDS was found to be stable and it was found to have satisfactory reliability and validity. Normative data were collected so that raw scores could be converted to standardized scores. While still in the experimental stages, the MAEDS shows promise as a valid and economical measure of treatment interventions for anorexia and bulimia nervosa.

Alcohol effects on behavioral thermoregulation with microwave radiation.

Ethanol may play an active role in modifying "set point" levels in conjunction with behavioral thermoregulation. A geometric series of doses of ethanol solutions was administered (ip) prior to fixed-interval 2-min. schedules of microwave reinforcement in rats tested in a cold environment. Four Sprague-Dawley rats were conditioned to regulate their thermal environment with 5-sec. exposures of MW reinforcement. Friedman's nonparametric test showed significant differences between ethanol doses, and Sign tests showed that moderate and high doses of ethanol suppressed operant behavior reinforced by MW radiation. Interactions between changes in "set-point" and discriminative properties of ethanol are discussed.

Cognitive bias in eating disorders: interpretation of ambiguous body-related information.

Three groups of women: eating disorder, body dysphoric controls, and nonsymptomatic controls, participated in an experiment testing hypotheses derived from cognitive-behavioral theories of eating disorders. In phase 1, participants encoded ambiguous information via instructions to imagine themselves in a variety of ambiguous situations that involved two types of information: body-related or health-related. On a subsequent memory task, participants in the eating disorder group and the body dysphoric control group recalled imagery of the body-related situations with a fatness interpretation and participants in the nonsymptomatic control group recalled imagery with a thinness interpretation. The three groups did not differ in their interpretation of the health-related situations. In phase 2, participants were instructed to imagine themselves in each body-related situation, but were explicitly instructed to imagine the scenes with either a positive or negative interpretation. Results indicated that the eating disorder and body dysphoric groups were able to change their interpretation of body-related information when instructed to do so.

Psychological adjustment in the children of mothers with a history of eating disorders.

In order to test the impact of mothers' eating disorders (EDs) on their children's psychological adjustment, we recruited mothers belonging to three different populations: women with eating disorders, women with depression, and normal controls. The parents responded to self-report inventories relating to psychological adjustment of the parent and child. The study found that the psychological adjustment of the children of mothers with a history of ED was not different from that of the children of mothers in the normal control group, although mothers described significant pregnancy and birth complications, parenting stress, and symptoms of clinical depression. The children of mothers with a history of depression had significantly greater psychological problems in comparison with those of the children of mothers in the other two groups. The results are interpreted in the context of the protective factors that may have buffered the effects of maternal psychopathology in children of mothers with a history of ED.