| dc.description.abstract | Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore the role of two emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, in the framework of recovery from eating disorders. It aimed to investigate whether women who recovered from an ED report fewer issues with emotion regulation compared to women who never had an ED. Moreover, it explored a possible relationship between the two emotion regulation strategies and eating pathology.
Method: A total of 134 English speaking women voluntarily participated in this online study. 89 women were part of the control group, having no history of an ED, whilst 45 women were part of the recovered from an ED group.
The main instrument used was the ERQ (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire) to assess the two emotion regulation strategies, and several other questionnaires were used too, such as the EDEQ (Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire) to measure eating pathology.
Results: Women recovered from an ED do not significantly differ from women who have never had an ED in terms of emotion regulation strategies. Cognitive reappraisal did not result in significantly lower levels in the recovered group, and expressive suppression did not result in significantly higher levels in the recovered group; this confirmed the first two hypotheses.
Correlation analyses showed that eating pathology was associated to expressive suppression, the maladaptive strategy, and when accounting for eating pathology, it was found that there were no differences between the two groups for this specific emotion regulation strategy.
Conclusion: The present study suggests that women recovered from an ED have average levels of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, when compared to women who have never had an ED. It also proposes that normalized emotion regulation strategies, such as the two studied in this paper, may be an indicator of recovery from an ED. | |
