Citation

Rodrigue C, Labrecque I, Turcotte O, Bégin C (2018) Muscle Dysmorphia and Eating Disorders: Comparison on Self-Esteem and Personality Traits. Int J Psychol Psychoanal 4:037. doi.org/10.23937/2572-4037.1510037

Copyright

© 2018 Rodrigue C, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE | OPEN ACCESS DOI: 10.23937/2572-4037.1510037

Muscle Dysmorphia and Eating Disorders: Comparison on Self-Esteem and Personality Traits

Christopher Rodrigue, Isabelle Labrecque, Olivier Turcotte and Catherine Bégin*

School of Psychology, Laval University, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Even though muscle dysmorphia (MD) is classified as a body dysmorphic disorder, it shares similarities with eating disorders (ED). The aim of the present study was to explore similarities between men with MD, women with ED, and a control group of men with body related preoccupations, regarding self-esteem, body esteem, and personality traits. Analyses revealed that clinical groups reported lower body esteem, more perfectionism and narcissism than the control group; only the ED group showed a significantly lower self-esteem than the control group. Also, men with MD showed higher self-esteem and body-esteem, as well as a higher level of narcissistic grandiosity than women with ED. Even though, we cannot exclude that gender differences could partly explain these findings, the present results suggested that a preserved self-esteem and a heightened narcissistic grandiosity tend to characterize MD.