The Connection Between Attachment, Emotional Regulation and Mentalization Failures in Anorexia Nervosa

Study goals:

1. To validate the Hebrew version of the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) which asses mentalization ability and mentalization failures (Dziobek et al., 2006). This version of the MASC was recently designed by the study group in Haifa University. The validation of this version of the MASC will be done by comparing patients with AN to non-patients.
2. To examine the connection between attachment styles, emotional regulation strategies, mentalization, and specific mentalization failures.

Study Hypotheses:

1. In respect to the first goal of the study, we hypothesize that a. a significant correlation between the MASC and other tools examining different aspects of mentalization (RME, CAM, TAS and RFQ) will be fond; b. different patterns of mentalization will be found between the clinical group and the control group on the MASC. More specifically, patients with AN will show more hypo-mentalization tendencies on the MASC then the control group.
2. regarding the second goal of the study, we hypothesize that the connection between attachment and mentalization failures will be mediated via emotional regulation strategies. More specifically, we anticipate that the connection between avoidant attachment and hypo-mentalization will be mediated via emotional isolation strategy and the connection between anxious attachment and hyper-mentalization will be mediated via emotional flood.

Method: