Michael Zeiler, Julia Philipp, Stefanie Truttmann, Konstantin Kopp, Gabriele Schöfbeck, Dunja Mairhofer, Hartmut Imgart, Annika Zanko, Ellen Auer-Welsbach, Andreas Karwautz, Gudrun Wagner
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Objective: Parents of children diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN) are facing multiple burdens when caring for their child. This study uses a psychological network approach to identify central factors among parental caregiving burdens and experiences which then can constitute promising targets for caregiver interventions.
Method: A total of 348 parents (247 mothers, 101 fathers) of children diagnosed with AN (96% female, 90% restrictive type) provided data including parental psychopathology, eating-disorder related burden, high-expressed emotion and perceived caregiver skills at baseline and after having participated in a parental skills training, multi-family therapy or systemic family therapy. Regularized partial correlation networks including 14 variables were estimated for baseline and follow-up data were estimated.
Results: High-expressed emotion, particularly parental emotional overinvolvement emerged as the most central variable in the network showing substantial correlations with depression and low self-care behavior. Emotional overinvolvement also functioned as a bridge variable between parental psychopathology, perceived caregiver skills, and eating disorder-related burden. Moreover, parental criticism was strongly associated with burden due to the child's confrontational behavior and low levels of parental frustration tolerance. Network comparison tests neither revealed statistically significant differences in network structure and global network strength between baseline and follow-up, nor between mothers and fathers.
Discussion: This study highlights the importance of parental high-expressed emotion as a promising treatment target. Adding or intensifying intervention components promoting parental emotion regulation strategies as well as intensified training in Motivational Interviewing may be useful therapeutic approaches to decrease overall parental burden.
期刊介绍:
Articles featured in the journal describe state-of-the-art scientific research on theory, methodology, etiology, clinical practice, and policy related to eating disorders, as well as contributions that facilitate scholarly critique and discussion of science and practice in the field. Theoretical and empirical work on obesity or healthy eating falls within the journal’s scope inasmuch as it facilitates the advancement of efforts to describe and understand, prevent, or treat eating disorders. IJED welcomes submissions from all regions of the world and representing all levels of inquiry (including basic science, clinical trials, implementation research, and dissemination studies), and across a full range of scientific methods, disciplines, and approaches.