Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Anger; Body dysmorphic disorder; Compulsive skin picking; Fear; Academic theses;
Abstract
Body image concerns are pervasive throughout Western culture, but there is a subset of the population who become so preoccupied with specific aspects of their appearance that it leads to clinically significant distress and impairment in their daily lives. This study examined symptoms of two disorders dealing with body concerns: Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) and Pathological Skin Picking (PSP). The primary purpose of this study was to use the bidimensional model of 'fear' and 'anger' (Lara et al., 2006) to test the relationship between BOD & PSP. The model suggests that BDD and PSP are both characterized by high 'anger' (drive) and high 'fear' (compulsivity), but that BDD would be characterized by higher 'fear' whereas PSP would be characterized by higher 'anger'. A secondary purpose of this thesis was to further test the bidimensional model of 'fear' and 'anger' using other disorders, including Pathological Gambling, Depression, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Participants were 330 undergraduates from the a small Midwestern university who completed the MMPI-2-RF (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008) and a packet of surveys including the Body Image Disturbance Questionnaire (Cash et al., 2004), Skin Picking Scale (Keuthen et al., 2001), Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory - Revised (Foa et al., 2002), and Barratt Impulsiveness Scale - Version 11 (Barratt, 1959), among others. BDD and PSP were low-base rate behaviors in the college sample, and BOD and PSP were more prevalent in women than men. BDD and PSP were both characterized by high 'fear', but each had no correlation with 'anger'. Further, the differing levels of 'fear' and 'anger' that the model predicted to differentiate between BOD and PSP were not significant. When the other disorders were used to test the bidimensional model, mixed results were found. Higher Pathological Gambling score in females were actually correlated with high 'fear' and high 'anger' while higher Pathological Gambling scores in males were significantly correlated with low 'fear' and not with anger. Depression and ADHD significantly correlated with both high 'fear' and low 'fear' and had no correlation to 'anger'. Obviously this creates a significant problem for the bidimensional model as two disorders appear to be correlated with both ends of one dimension (high fear- low fear) and neither of the ends of the other dimension (high drive-low drive). Though these results need replication, the majority of the results suggest that the bidimensional model is inadequate in characterizing what constructs underlie specific disorders and explaining how different disorders relate to others as it is too simplistic and does a poor job of taking into account gender differences within disorders.
Year of Submission
2010
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Psychology
First Advisor
John E. Williams
Second Advisor
Helen Harton
Third Advisor
Sunde Nesbit
Date Original
2010
Object Description
1 PDF file (109 leaves)
Copyright
©2010 Nicole Christine Egan
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Egan, Nicole Christine, "Testing the Relationship Between Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Pathological Skin Picking Using a Bidimensional Model of ‘Fear’ and ‘Anger'" (2010). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2561.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2561
Comments
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