Binge Eating Disorder in community girls: exploring the predictive role of attachment and alexithymia

The Binge Eating Disorder (BED) resulted the most common eating disorder among teenagers. Many studies linked eating disorders during adolescence with insecure attachment representations and/or higher levels of alexithymia, but few studies investigated these variables specifically with respect to the risk of BED in adolescence. Besides, those studies mostly involved clinical samples, while to our knowledge there are no studies on community adolescents. In this pilot study we aimed to investigate the role of attachment and alexithymia with respect to binge eating symptoms showed by 44 community girls (aged 14-18, M = 15.7, SD = 1.1), enrolled from Ligurian high-schools. As this is the second wave of a larger study, the levels of binge eating symptoms of participants were previously screened thorough the Binge Eating Scale (BES; cut-off >17). For this study we administered the Friends & Family Interview (FFI) to assess attachment representations, in terms of classifications (secure, dismissing, preoccupied and disorganized) and scales; the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) to detect the levels of alexithymia, also in their factors of Difficulty to Identifying (DIF) and to Describing (DDF) Feelings and Externally Oriented Thinking (EOT). Total score of BED correlated with attachment security (r = .391, p = .009) and preoccupation (r = .361, p = .016) and with alexithymia DIF (r = .304, p = .045). In a stepwise regression, insecure-preoccupied attachment and difficulty to identifying feelings predicted 24.7% of the variance in BES scores (adjusted-R= .211, p = .011). Eating binge may be a maladaptive strategy to cope with the difficulty to identifying and regulating feelings of anger and stress, then adolescents could be fostered in the acquisition of more adaptive emotion regulation abilities.