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Cognitive abilities of female adolescents with anorexia nervosa
Author(s) -
Kowalski Patricia Simovich
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
international journal of eating disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.785
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1098-108X
pISSN - 0276-3478
DOI - 10.1002/1098-108x(198609)5:6<983::aid-eat2260050603>3.0.co;2-m
Subject(s) - psychology , anorexia nervosa , cognition , developmental psychology , eating disorders , clinical psychology , psychiatry
Theories on the development of anorexia nervosa suggest that the anorexic's fear of adolescence and her desire to remain in childhood are influenced by difficulties she experiences in making the transition to adolescence. One deficit repeatedly observed in the anorexic is her tendency to reason in a childlike manner. In a preliminary investigation of anorexics' characteristic reasoning abilities, formal reasoning tasks were given to anorexics, normally, developing adolescents, and prepubertal children. It was hypothesized that if adolescent anorexics are childlike in their reasoning across a set of measures of cognitive ability, they would appear more similar to prepubertal children than to adolescents. The results of multivariate and univariate analyses showed anorexics to be more similar to normally developing adolescents than to prepubertal children. On only one of the four dependent measures did anorexics appear cognitively more like prepubertal children than other adolescents. Results were discussed in terms of possible specific rather than global deficits and ways in which these deficits could be investigated.