The Body Dysmorphic Disorder Symptom Scale: Development and preliminary validation of a self-report scale of symptom specific dysfunction

•We developed a new self-report measure of BDD symptom severity (BDD-SS).•The BDD-SS fills a gap in the field by capturing the broad range of BDD symptoms.•We present initial results on the psychometric properties of the BDD-SS.•The BDD-SS has potential utility in clinical and research settings.

The Body Dysmorphic Disorder Symptom Scale (BDD-SS) is a new self-report measure used to examine the severity of a wide variety of symptoms associated with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). The BDD-SS was designed to differentiate, for each group of symptoms, the number of symptoms endorsed and their severity. This report evaluates and compares the psychometric characteristics of the BDD-SS in relation to other measures of BDD, body image, and depression in 99 adult participants diagnosed with BDD. Total scores of the BDD-SS showed good reliability and convergent validity and moderate discriminant validity. Analyses of the individual BDD-SS symptom groups confirmed the reliability of the checking, grooming, weight/shape, and cognition groups. The current findings indicate that the BDD-SS can be quickly administered and used to examine the severity of heterogeneous BDD symptoms for research and clinical purposes.