"What I wouldn't do to be Alice climbing through the looking glass, taking one of those pills that makes you small, so small. What I wouldn't do to be less,” says Elizabeth Wurtzel in "Prozac Nation," her memoir about the struggles of depression. As hard as it may seem to understand what causes thoughts like these to latch on and become all-consuming for some people and fleeting fancy for others, a study presented in the January 2010 edition of the journal Behavior Modification tries to understand what causes these thoughts to manifest as detrimental behaviors. As irrelevant as this study may seem to your life right now, it gives a broader idea of what you may face in college. Everything doesn’t always revolve around getting good grades, sometimes it is necessary to focus on your mental and physical in order to better navigate through "the real world," as adults always love to say. This study provides useful information in an objective way by providing background information, providing steps and rationale for methods, and discussing the experiment's shortcomings and implications. Whether a reader is suffering from an eating disorder or not, this study reveals some of the motivations behind eating disorders.
This study gives background information about how the researchers hypothesize that a combination of both psychological flexibility and societal pressures can cause eating disorders to develop. Psychological flexibility is basically a way to objectify your thoughts about an event or even yourself without allowing that thought, negative or positive, to direct the way you behave. A weak or strong psychological flexibility can determine whether a passing thought or a well-aimed insult results in an obsessive behavior, like anorexia or bulimia nervosa. The study explains that society leads to an unhealthy obsession with an "ideal weight and shape as a means of achieving self-acceptance, self-control over diet and weight, and acceptance by others." This type of pressure from society or even just college students, (yes, peer pressure still exists, even in college), can lead to eating disorders that can be linked with distress and functional impairment. As such, this article seeks to prove how the relationship between eating disorders and poor psychological outcomes is influenced by a psychologically flexible response.
The study clearly describes the research methods used and how participants were chosen. It explains that participants were college undergraduate students in psychology classes who volunteered to take surveys. From the volunteers the researchers then filtered out those who took the survey too fast or too slow due to the questionable validity of their responses. To evaluate the responses the researchers used four measures to determine distorted perceptions related to eating disorders, psychological flexibility, general psychological health, and personal anxieties. Each of these four measures was clearly explained both in terms of how they were used in the research and what their relevance to the experiment was. They also provided examples and references to the original creators of the different measurement methods. These clear examples and references lend credibility to the methods and to the experiment itself as a whole, because it allows other research psychologists, or even a future undergraduate student, to both repeat the experiment and find resources for their own experiments.
To conclude the research the article ends with a discussion of the results in terms of the implications and the shortcomings of the experiment. The results gathered from the experiment agreed with the hypothesis that was initially proposed by the researchers. Meaning that the results showed a positive relationship between eating disorders and poor psychological outcomes, as well as an as of yet undetermined connection between the two that is dependent upon psychological flexibility. It is this undetermined connection that the researchers believe can spur more research into how to provide proper treatment for those who respond to certain psychological traumas differently. In terms of shortcomings, the article clearly states them and lists solutions that would both eliminate the problems and expand the scope of the study. The study was obviously limited in that it only applied to undergraduate students who were taking psychology classes, which would skew the data due to their above average knowledge of psychology and certain variables that would affect college students, but not other demographics. The researchers also noted that none of these participants were ever a part of a clinical trial or diagnosed with having a psychological disorder. The article also noted that the measures used in the experiment are not the most widely used in eating disorder research.
In conclusion, the study provides useful background information, explains its methods in a way that makes them easily repeatable, and discusses its results in a way that causes the reader to fully understand that eating disorders are much more intricate than they seem at first thought. Although eating disorders may not be the first thing on your mind when you think about college, they do occur just as frequently on campus as they do off of it. It may not seem relevant now, but when the friend of a friend just needs someone to talk to the information from this study will help you to better listen.
Masuda, A., Price, M., Anderson, P., Wendell, J. Disordered Eating-Related Cognition and Psychological Flexibility as Predictors of Psychological Health Among College Students, Behavior Modification, January 2010, 34.1, http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/34/1/3
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