The Social Appearance Anxiety Scale in Italian Adolescent Populations: Construct Validation and Group Discrimination in Community and Clinical Eating Disorders Samples
- 15 May 2015
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Child Psychiatry and Human Development
- Vol. 47 (1), 133-150
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-015-0551-1
Abstract
Anxiety in situations where one’s overall appearance (including body shape) may be negatively evaluated is hypothesized to play a central role in Eating Disorders (EDs) and in their co-occurrence with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). Three studies were conducted among community (N = 1995) and clinical (N = 703) ED samples of 11- to 18-year-old Italian girls and boys to (a) evaluate the psychometric qualities and measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) of the Social Appearance Anxiety (SAA) Scale (SAAS) and (b) determine to what extent SAA or other situational domains of social anxiety related to EDs distinguish adolescents with an ED only from those with SAD. Results upheld the one-factor structure and ME/I of the SAAS across samples, gender, age categories, and diagnostic status (i.e., ED participants with and without comorbid SAD). The SAAS demonstrated high internal consistency and 3-week test–retest reliability. The strength of the inter-relationships between SAAS and measures of body image, teasing about appearance, ED symptoms, depression, social anxiety, avoidance, and distress, as well as the ability of SAAS to discriminate community adolescents with high and low levels of ED symptoms and community participants from ED participants provided construct validity evidence. Only SAA strongly differentiated adolescents with any ED from those with comorbid SAD (23.2 %). Latent mean comparisons across all study groups were performed and discussed.Keywords
This publication has 66 references indexed in Scilit:
- Brain responses to body image stimuli but not food are altered in women with bulimia nervosaBMC Psychiatry, 2013
- Male body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptomatology: Moderating variables among menJournal of Health Psychology, 2013
- Are the Male Body Dissatisfaction and Drive for Muscularity Scales reliable and valid instruments?Journal of Health Psychology, 2013
- The role of peer influence on girls’ body dissatisfaction and dietingEuropean Review of Applied Psychology, 2013
- The relationship of sex and sexual orientation to self-esteem, body shape satisfaction, and eating disorder symptomatologyFrontiers in Psychology, 2013
- The comorbidity between eating disorders and anxiety disorders: Prevalence in an eating disorder sample and anxiety disorder sampleAustralian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2012
- Social anxiety and eating disorder comorbidity: The role of negative social evaluation fearsEating Behaviors, 2012
- Dieting and Disordered Eating Behaviors from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Findings from a 10-Year Longitudinal StudyJournal of the American Dietetic Association, 2011
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Adolescents With Bipolar Disorder: A 1-Year Open TrialJournal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2007
- Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternativesStructural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1999