Sensitivity to punishment and low maternal care account for the link between bulimic and social anxiety symptomology.

Objective: The current study examined the joint effect of personality and parenting factors on the prediction of bulimia nervosa (BN) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) symptomology in a sample of female college students. The study also tested whether personality and parenting factors might account for the association between BN and SAD symptoms.

Method: One-hundred twenty-eight participants completed self-report measures assessing maternal care (MC), maternal overprotection, sensitivity to punishment (SP), sensitivity to reward (SR), and BN and SAD symptomology.

Results: SP, SR, and MC each uniquely predicted BN symptoms, whereas only SP and MC predicted SAD symptoms. High SP interacted with low MC to predict BN and SAD symptoms over the main effects. In addition, SP, MC, and the interaction term SP x MC mediated the association between SAD and BN symptoms.

Conclusion: High SP and low MC appear to account for the link between BN and SAD symptomology, whereas high SR appears to distinguish the disorders.