Social anxiety and associations with eating psychopathology: Mediating effects of fears of evaluation

• Social anxiety relates to drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and bulimic symptoms.
• Fear of negative evaluation mediates between social anxiety and eating pathology.
• Body mass index may moderate the above relationship.
• Fear of positive evaluation does not mediate between social anxiety and eating domains.

Recent work suggests unique relations among features of social anxiety disorder and eating disorder pathology. Thus, it may be important to determine specific facets of social anxiety that account for the relation between it and eating disorders. Given the similarities in social-evaluative concerns in both sets of symptoms, we hypothesized that fears of both positive and negative evaluation would each independently account for the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and eating pathology among college females (N=167). Results were partially supportive of hypotheses. Fear of negative evaluation independently accounted for a significant portion of the relationship between social anxiety and each domain of eating pathology that was tested, which included Drive for Thinness, Body Dissatisfaction, and Bulimic Symptoms. Body mass index appeared to play a moderating role on the relationship between fear of negative evaluation and body dissatisfaction, but not drive for thinness or bulimia symptoms. Clinical implications including diagnostic and treatment considerations will be discussed.