Introduction
Theory and evidence suggest that personality characteristics explain important variability in the onset, course, symptoms, and treatment outcome of eating disorders. Personality is individuals’ characteristic ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving, whereas personality disorders are extreme, inflexible, or maladaptive personality traits which cause difficulties in functioning or distress. In addition to considering normal-range personality traits and personality disorders, we also consider personality pathology, or dysfunctional personality traits.
The most common eating disorders are anorexia nervosa, which is a syndrome of self-starvation; bulimia nervosa, which involves recurrent binge eating (i.e., episodes of eating an unusually large amount of food while feeling out of control) and inappropriate compensatory behaviors such as...
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Farstad, S.M., von Ranson, K.M. (2020). Personality and Eating Disorders. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2108
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2108
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