Exploring how trauma, stress, and sexuality shape eating behavior

Eating disorders and other body image-related disorders (e.g., body dysmorphic disorder, muscle dysmorphia) affect millions of Americans each year. The primary focus of the lab is on researching outcomes related to eating pathology, such as body image concerns, comorbidity, and impulsivity. 

Similarly, we are also working to create novel interventions that can more effectively target and improve eating disordered behavior. Within this realm, various methods of interest include just-in-time adaptive interventions, longitudinal network analysis, and ecological momentary assessment.

Sexual and gender minority individuals are at heightened risk for the development of eating pathology. Specifically, there is evidence that sexual minority men, bisexual plus women, and transgender individuals are at particular risk.

Our current research focuses on how minority stressors such as discrimination and internalized homophobia interact with eating disorder predictors such as body image concerns to determine outcomes for sexual and gender minority individuals. In addition, our research focuses on factors such as community involvement for alleviating eating disorder concerns.

Traumatic exposure is a non-specific risk factor of the onset of multiple kinds of psychopathology. However, recent research has demonstrated that comorbid PTSD may impair the ability of patients to benefit from eating disorder treatment in the long term, possibly because of the mutual interrelationships between symptoms.

Our current research focuses on elucidating the relationship between trauma-related and eating disorder symptoms, disentangling risk factors, and creating interventions that would be able to target both eating pathology and PTSD simultaneously.