Objective Relationships among coping strategies, negative body image, and eating disturbance were studied. Method: Subjects were 128 college women; measures included the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT‐26), the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), and three indices of negative body image. Results: Higher use of both emotion‐oriented coping and avoidance‐oriented coping via distraction was associated with higher EAT scores; higher use of emotion‐oriented coping also was associated with more negative body image. Findings agree with data associating these coping styles with other measures of psychological distress and psychopathology. Task‐oriented coping also was high, but unrelated to negative body image or eating disturbance. Hierarchical regression analysis yielded a significant interaction between emotion‐oriented coping and negative body image: The higher the use of emotion‐oriented coping, the less the level of negative body image appeared to affect EAT score. Discussion: Both the main effect for coping and the interaction suggest that high use of emotion‐oriented coping should be considered a risk factor for eating disturbance. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Eat Disord 22: 51–56, 1997.

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