Female students' disordered eating and the big five personality facets ☆ Vance V. MacLaren, Lisa A. Best ⁎ University of New Brunswick, Department of Psychology, Box 5050, 100 Tucker Park Road, Saint John, NB, Canada E2L 4L5 abstract article info Article history: Received 7 October 2008 Recieved in revised form 1 April 2009 Accepted 10 April 2009 Keywords: Disordered eating Attitudes Personality Big five Female undergraduate students at two Canadian universities (N =378) completed the NEO PI-R (Costa, P.T. & McCrae, R.R. (1992). NEO PI-R Professional Manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources) and the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26; Garner, D. M., Olmstead, M. P., Bohr, Y. & Garfinkel, P. E. (1982). The Eating Attitudes Test: Psychometric features and clinical correlates. Psychological Medicine, 12, 871–878.). Eating disorder symptomatic (N = 43) and nonsymptomatic (N = 335) women differed on facets of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. Among symptomatic women, the Oral Control subscale of the EAT-26 was correlated significantly with facets of Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Specifically, the Impulsivity facet of Neuroticism was positively correlated with the Bulimia and Food Preoccupation subscale of EAT-26, but negatively correlated with the Oral Control and Dieting subscales. Overall, results suggest that high scores on Neuroticism may be a risk factor for development of disordered eating behavior and that the degree of Impulsiveness may predict the eating disorder subtype to which one is most susceptible. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia afflict 0.3% and 1% of women, respectively, with the greatest prevalence among Caucasian women between 15 and 24 years (Hoek, 2006). A Canadian survey showed that 2.8% of women and .5% of men reported significant symptoms of an eating disorder (Gadalla & Piran, 2007). Although the prevalence of eating disorders is relatively rare, unhealthy preoccupations with weight are common. Hautala, Junnila, Helenius, Vaananen, and Liuksila et al. (2008) reported that approximately 25% of normal weight girls in the United States perceive themselves as fat and 50% of girls report controlling their weight in an unhealthy manner. Adolescents with emotional disorders (such as depression and anxiety) are at a greater risk of developing an eating disorder (Wade, Bergin, Martin, Gillespie, & Fairburn, 2006). Given the prevalence of these unhealthy behaviors, it is important to carefully examine the factors underlying eating disorders. Individual personality traits were conceived within the ‘Big Five’ model (Costa & McCrae, 1992) that includes subscales to measure Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The five factor model is hierarchical in nature, with each domain containing six facets that may be measured with psychometrically validated instruments such as the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Eating disorders have been examined at the level of the five personality domains. Neuroticism is most consistently associated with eating disorder diagnosis (Diaz-Marza, Carrasco, & Saiz, 2000; Ghaderi & Scott, 2000) and is correlated with eating disorder symptoms in non-clinical samples (Miller, Schmidt, Vaillancourt, McDougall & Laliberte, 2006; Wade, Martin, Tiggeman, Abraham, & Treloar et al., 2000). Specifically, the combination of high Neuroticism and low Extraversion has been reported to be a risk factor for eating disorders (Miller et al., 2006). Ghaderi and Scott (2000) found that low Conscientiousness, low Agreeableness, and high Openness to be predictive of the development of an eating disorder. Relationships between specific personality factors and symptoms of an eating disorder are made complex by the fact that specific eating disorders may differ in their etiology and symptoms. Bollen and Wojciechowski (2004) found that both restricting and binging/ purging Anorexic women were higher in Neuroticism than non-eating disordered women but, unlike the binging/purging anorexics the restricting anorexics had higher scores on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness subscales. Similarly, Claes, Vandereycken, Luyten, Soenens, and Pieters et al., (2006) identified three subtypes of eating disordered personalities: those with no elevated five factor scores; an undercontrolled group with high Neuroticism, low Conscientiousness and low Agreeableness; and an overcontrolled group showing high Neuroticism, high Conscientiousness and low Openness. These studies raise the intriguing possibility although high levels of Neuroticism may act as a risk factor predisposing individuals to some kind of pathological eating behavior, the prediction of the exact symptomol- ogy may be aided by close examination of other personality characteristics. Bollen and Wojciechowski (2004) and Claes et al. (2006) used the 60-item version of the NEO and were not able to conduct facet level analysis. Because the 240-item NEO PI-R measures six separate facets within each of the five domains (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001), it allows Eating Behaviors 10 (2009) 192–195 ☆ Special thanks to Kimberly Arsenault, Sarah Arthurs, Rebecca Freeze, Aren Hunter, Blake MacGowan, and Stephanie Jones for help with data collection. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: vancemaclaren@gmail.com (V.V. MacLaren), lbest@unb.ca (L.A. Best). 1471-0153/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2009.04.001 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Eating Behaviors