Award Date

1-1-2006

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

Russell T. Hurlburt

Number of Pages

262

Abstract

Inner experience is of crucial importance in bulimia---clearly something experiential leads individuals to binge or purge. We used Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) to examine the inner experience of bulimia in 5 participants, replicating Doucette (1992). Our participants' inner experiences were largely consistent with Doucette's but were substantially different from what is assumed by the non-DES literature: our bulimic participants had a consistent fragmentation of attention, hypersensitivity to the sensory aspects of experience, affect that is poorly differentiated and often confused with cognition, and a striking lack of cognition overall. These results suggest that DES can be a powerful tool to challenge the assumptions of the extant literature and to expand our understanding of bulimia.

Keywords

Bulimia; Experience; Inner

Controlled Subject

Clinical psychology

File Format

pdf

File Size

6615.04 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

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