NEDA TOOLKIT for Parents
Temperament and Personality
Our personalities are molded by both the genes we
inherit and our life experiences. Psychologists have been
trying for decades to identify the different aspects of
personality or temperament that help make us tick.
Over the years, scientists have found distinct personality
traits in individuals with eating disorders. They appear
relatively specific to each disorder and can distinguish
eating disorder sufferers from healthy people.
Some studies have associated aspects of these
personality traits with alterations in serotonin and
dopamine signaling.
Anorexia Nervosa
People who suffer from anorexia nervosa tend to
have high levels of harm avoidance, a personality trait
characterized by worrying, pessimism, and shyness, and
low levels of novelty seeking, which includes impulsivity
and preferring new or novel things (Fassino et al.,
2002). The different subtypes of anorexia have slightly
different personality traits, with the binge/purge
subtype showing slightly higher levels of impulsivity
and novelty-seeking (Bulik et al., 1995). The restricting
subtype had higher levels of persistence (Klump et al.,
2000). Researchers have linked higher levels of harm
avoidance with higher levels of serotonin in the brain
(Cloninger, 1985), and scientists have linked harm
avoidance with specific alterations in the serotonin
system in women recovered from anorexia (Bailer et
al., 2005).
A study measuring slightly different facets of personality
found that women with either the restricting or
binge/purge subtype of anorexia had higher levels of
neuroticism (characterized by depression, anxiety,
worry, and moodiness) than controls, and that women
with restricting anorexia scored higher on measures of
agreeableness and conscientiousness than those with
the binge/purge type (Bollen & Wojciechowski, 2004).
Bulimia Nervosa
Individuals with bulimia nervosa have high levels of
harm avoidance like anorexia sufferers, but instead it’s
paired with high levels of novelty seeking (Fassino et
al., 2002). This study found that those with the binge/
purge subtype of anorexia show traits that are midway
between restricting anorexia and bulimia. Other
research has found high levels of impulsivity, emotion
dysregulation, and anxiety in women with bulimia, and
greater impulsivity was associated with more frequent
purging behaviors (Brown, Haedt-Matt, & Keel, 2011).
Scientists found that people who have trouble
regulating the amount of dopamine in their brains have
higher levels of novelty-seeking (Zald et al., 2008), and
that this also occurs in women with bulimia (Groleau et
al., 2012).
Anorexia and bulimia
Although some personality traits are specific to each
eating disorder diagnosis, other traits are more general
and appear to be shared by many or most individuals
with eating disorders. Researchers at King’s College
London identified a set of five obsessive-compulsive
personality traits (perfectionism, inflexibility, rule
driven, drive-for-order and symmetry, excessive doubt
and cautiousness) and found that women with anorexia
and bulimia were significantly more likely to have
shown signs of these in childhood (they were almost
never seen in healthy controls). What’s more, the
presence of each of these traits increased a person’s
odds of developing an eating disorder by seven. A
person who had all five of these traits is thirty-five
times more likely to develop an eating disorder than
someone who shows none of these traits (Anderluh et
al., 2003).
Separately from other obsessive-compulsive traits,
individuals with eating disorders show high levels of
perfectionism, especially a type known as self-oriented
perfectionism, in which a person has unreasonably high
standards for themselves but not others. Researchers
found equally high levels of perfectionism in women
with either anorexia or bulimia in two separate studies
(Halmi et al., 2005; Bulik et al., 2003).
Binge Eating Disorder
Personality traits are less well-defined in binge eating
disorder than in anorexia or bulimia. Preliminary
research in Comprehensive Psychology found that
people with binge eating disorder had higher levels of
harm avoidance and novelty seeking and lower levels
of self-directedness than healthy controls (Grucza,
Przybeck, & Cloninger, 2007).
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