Knowledge Bank

In recent years, the relationship between eating disorder symptomatology and perfectionism has been the subject of much study; however, research has not been consistent on whether a relationship exists between these two variables. Therefore, the present study investigated whether third variables (i.e., body surveillance, body shame, and self-esteem) moderated this relationship with 307 college women. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that the proposed variables did not moderate the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and eating disorder symptomatology. However, it was noted that maladaptive perfectionism directly contributed unique variance to eating disorder symptomatology above and beyond the variance of the proposed moderators, suggesting that it is a unique predictor of disordered eating for college women.