Is being underweight associated with impairments in quality of life in the absence of significant eating disorder pathology?

Few studies have compared low-weight individuals with eating disorder (ED) pathology with similar-weight individuals without significant pathology despite the fact that body weight is often used as a key outcome within ED research. This study compared quality of life (QoL) in one group with high levels of ED pathology to a group with low ED pathology, matched by body mass index (BMI). The high ED group reported significantly lower ED-specific quality of life (EDQoL) than the low ED group. These findings suggest that young women with high levels of ED pathology report significantly more impaired QoL than comparable young women with no ED pathology, and that being underweight alone is not a primary contributor to poorer EDQoL.

The Children's Attributional Style Interview: developmental tests of cognitive diathesis-stress theories of depression.

This paper presents an initial assessment of the Children's Attributional Style Interview (CASI), a newly designed measure for assessing attributional style in young children (age 5 and up). The CASI was used to conduct prospective tests of the reformulated helplessness and the integrated hopelessness/self-esteem theories of depression in a sample of 147 5-10-year-old children. For comparison, the same tests were also conducted with the Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire-Revised, a commonly used measure for assessing attributional style in older children (age 8 and up). The CASI evidenced support of the reformulated helplessness theory and partial support of the integrated hopelessness/self-esteem theory. The CASI also demonstrated good internal consistency. Thus, our findings provide initial support for the CASI as a methodologically sound measure of attributional style for children as young as 5 years old. Although preliminary, our findings also suggest possible developmental differences in how attributional style interacts with self-esteem and negative life stress. The CASI should prove to be a useful tool in furthering the understanding of the origins and development of attributional style in childhood, as well as its contribution to the understanding of the development and prevention of depressive symptomatology in children.