Narcissistic personality features, self-reported anger and eating attitudes among non-clinical college population: An explorative study of underlying constructs

Introduction: The contribution of personality disorders to disordered eating has recently been of particular interest as an attempt to further understand the phenomenon and address therapeutic difficulties. Narcissism has been found to be more characteristic of individuals with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa than those with other psychiatric disturbances. Literature suggests that both eating and narcissistic personality disordered individuals appear to have difficulty with recognising and tolerating negative emotions. Empirical corroboration of the mediating mechanisms between narcissistic personality disorder and bulimia nervosa is lacking. Additionally, research concerning gender differences, narcissism and anger has yielded equivocal results. Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between maladaptive aspects of narcissism, anger traits and different elements of eating disordered attitudes. The study also attempted to evaluate gender differences on the above mentioned variables and to investigate possible mediating mechanisms (i.e. anger) between narcissistic personality disorder and bulimic tendencies. Method: One hundred and sixty non-clinical female and male participants have been recruited from universities’ classrooms of six London and Surrey based universities. The O’Brien Multiphasic Narcissism Inventory (OMNI), the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), the Eating Disorders Inventory-2 (EDI-2) and the Bulimic Investigatory Test Edinburgh (BITE) were used as the four measuring instruments for this study. Analysis has been carried out using Spearman’s Rho correlations, Mann Whitney U tests, Mediation and Multiple regression analysis. Results: An association between narcissistic personality disorder traits, its defensive style and eating disordered thoughts and behaviours was partially supported. There was also evidence to suggest some relationship between aspects of anger and disordered eating patterns as well as aspects of anger and narcissistic disturbance. Significant gender differences on eating attitudes and concerns were observed. Female and male college students did not differentiate on narcissistic personality traits, nor on ways of experiencing, expressing and controlling anger. Narcissistic personality disorder traits were found to be mediated by state anger on individuals with bulimic tendencies. Conclusions: Pursuing more complex conceptualization and measurements of narcissism, anger and eating attitudes for both sexes is necessary for the better understanding of co-morbid disorders. Affect-driven therapeutic models need to be considered for the treatment of patients with narcissistic personality and /or eating disorder presentation as these individuals appear to have difficulties in anger experience, expression and control. Future research needs to evaluate therapeutic efficacy of those models in a clinical population and explore further the role of shame and emotional schemas in narcissistic pathology

The influence of emotional intensity on facial emotion recognition in disordered eating

Significant facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits have been observed in participants exhibiting high levels of eating psychopathology. The current study aimed to determine if the pattern of FER deficits is influenced by intensity of facial emotion and to establish if eating psychopathology is associated with a specific pattern of emotion recognition errors that is independent of other psychopathological or personality factors. Eighty females, 40 high and 40 low scorers on the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI) were presented with a series of faces, each featuring one of five emotional expressions at one of four intensities, and were asked to identify the emotion portrayed. Results revealed that, in comparison to Low EDI scorers, high scorers correctly recognised significantly fewer expressions, particularly of fear and anger. There was also a trend for this deficit to be more evident for subtle displays of emotion (50% intensity). Deficits in anger recognition were related specifically to scores on the body dissatisfaction subscale of the EDI. Error analyses revealed that, in comparison to Low EDI scorers, high scorers made significantly more and fear-as-anger errors. Also, a tendency to label anger expressions as sadness was related to body dissatisfaction. Current findings confirm FER deficits in subclinical eating psychopathology and extend these findings to subtle expressions of emotion. Furthermore, this is the first study to establish that these deficits are related to a specific pattern of recognition errors. Impaired FER could disrupt normal social functioning and might represent a risk factor for the development of more severe psychopathology

Coping and Emotional Intelligence in Women with a History of Eating Disordered Behavior

Eating disorders pose a serious problem in our society. Studies have found that there is a negative correlation between eating disorders and emotional coping mechanisms, a factor of emotional intelligence (EI). This study was designed to discover if women who have a history of eating disorders resemble women who report no current or past history of eating disorders and women with current eating problems. Participants included 157 college females. It was found that women who reported a history of eating problems resembled the control group on most measures

Explicit and Inferred Motives for Nonsuicidal Self-Injurious Acts and Urges in Borderline and Avoidant Personality Disorders

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a perplexing phenomenon that may have differing motives. The present study used experience sampling methods (ESM) which inquired explicitly about the motives for NSSI, but also enabled a temporal examination of the antecedents/consequences of NSSI; these allow us to infer other motives which were not explicitly endorsed. Adults (n = 152, aged 18–65) with borderline personality disorder (BPD), avoidant personality disorder (APD), or no psychopathology participated in a 3-week computerized diary study. We examined 5 classes of explicit motives for engaging in NSSI, finding support primarily for internally directed rather than interpersonally directed ones. We then used multilevel regression to examine changes in affect, cognition, and behavior surrounding moments of NSSI acts/urges compared with control moments (i.e., without NSSI). We examined changes in 5 scales of inferred motives, designed to correspond to the 5 classes of explicit motives. The results highlight differing motives for NSSI among individuals with BPD and APD, with some similarities (mostly in the explicit motives) and some differences (mostly in the inferred motives) between the disorders. Despite their infrequent explicit endorsement, fluctuations in interpersonally oriented scales were found surrounding NSSI acts/urges. This highlights the need to continue attending to interpersonal aspects of NSSI in research and in clinical practice. Additionally, NSSI urges, like acts, were followed by decline in affective/interpersonal distress (although in a delayed manner). Thus, interventions that build distress tolerance and enhance awareness for affective changes, and for antecedent/consequence patterns in NSSI, could help individuals resist the urge to self-injure

Ontologies, Mental Disorders and Prototypes

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, the need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces

Can Self-Esteem Protect Against the Deleterious Consequences of Self-Objectification for Mood and Body Satisfaction in Physically Active Female University Students?

Using objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), this study tested the interaction between self-objectification, appearance evaluation, and self-esteem in predicting body satisfaction and mood states. Participants (N = 93) were physically active female university students. State self-objectification was manipulated by participants wearing tight revealing exercise attire (experimental condition) or baggy exercise clothes (control condition). Significant interactions emerged predicting depression, anger, fatness, and satisfaction with body shape and size. For participants in the self-objectification condition who had low (as opposed to high) appearance evaluation, low self-esteem was associated with high depression, anger, and fatness and low satisfaction with body shape and size. In contrast, for participants with high self-esteem, these mood and body satisfaction states were more favorable irrespective of their levels of appearance evaluation. For female exercisers, self-esteem-enhancing strategies may protect against some of the negative outcomes of self-objectification