Family, friends, and feelings: the role of relationships to parents and peers and alexithymia in adolescents with anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that affects mostly adolescent and young adult women. Individuals with anorexia nervosa often report problems in their relationships to close persons, e.g., to their parents or peers. Relationships to parents as well as peers undergo major changes during adolescence (with peer relationships gaining major importance), therefore, the present study focused on adolescent girls with anorexia nervosa and assessed the quality of their relationships to parents and peers. As expected, girls with anorexia nervosa reported poorer quality of relationships to their parents and especially to peers compared to healthy girls. Relationship quality was negatively associated with eating disorder symptoms, i.e., the lower relationship quality, the more pronounced were eating disorder symptoms. These results underline that treatment should not only focus on family relationships but also address relationships to peers with therapists encouraging adolescents with anorexia nervosa to establish and maintain friendships. Furthermore, the study revealed that alexithymia (a psychological characteristic involving difficulties in recognising and talking about one’s emotions) plays an important role in explaining the interplay between interpersonal relationships and eating disorder symptoms. However, the direction of effects remains unknown and further studies are needed to elucidate the mechanisms through which problems in relationships with close persons exert their influence on eating disorder symptoms and vice versa.