Prospective Analysis of Adolescent Girls’ Eating Disturbances and Self-reported Negative Affectivity

In the present study, we analyzed female adolescents’ disordered eating symptoms and their depression and negative emotionality over the four time period by using Latent Growth Modeling(LGM) method. The subjects were 589 adolescent girls drawing from a suburban Minnesotan school district. Assessment instruments were Eating Disorder Risk Index(EDRI), Depression(DEP) Scale of General Behavior Inventory(GBI), and Negative Emotionality(NE) higher-order factor in Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire(MPQ). The results were as follows. First, univariate analyses indicated that quadratic models over the linear model better fitted to all three variables, EDRI, DEP, and NE. Second, the growth factors (intercept, slope, and quadratic function) of each scale were significantly associated with one another, demonstrating that the change of adolescent girls’ disordered eating is significantly associated with the change in their depressed mood and negative emotionality. It is concluded that adolescents’ disordered eating problems are co-occurring with depressive and neurotic tendency, which is consistent with previous studies.