Stefanini, Maria Cristina

Expressed Emotion (EE) refers to the emotional behavior and patterns of communication of relatives toward patients, and it is a strong predictor of illness outcome across a variety of psychiatric disorders. The aims of the present study were to provide a contribution for the Italian validation of the Family Questionnaire (FQ), developed by Wiedemann et al. (2002). The FQ is a self-report questionnaire to assess the EE construct.

We focused on carers of subjects suffering from eating disorders (ED), and studied the characteristics that mostly expose them to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and expressed emotion, favoring the accommodation of the family system to the cared person. We administered the accommodation and enabling scale for eating disorders (AESED) questionnaire, the family questionnaire (FQ) and the depression, anxiety and stress scale (DASS-21) questionnaire to 97 carers of 62 ED patients, and investigated the carer's characteristics associated with the scores in the three questionnaires.