Eating Disorders (EDs) are chronic illnesses requiring long-term care and significant involvement of carers. Expressed Emotion (EE) is a measure of the ‘emotional temperature’ of a family: an index of the relative's emotional answer in a certain situation. Literature suggests that EE scores are usually low in EDs families and the degree of family EE correlates with patients’ outcome.

To compare EE, life events and anxiety between patients with diagnosis of EDs and patients with other psychiatric diagnosis.

To measure the level of EE in EDs families in order to improve the quality of health care.

We administered the following tests to 20 patients with EDs and 20 patients with other psychiatric diagnosis: the Level of Expressed Emotion Scale (LEE) in two versions, one for patients and one for relatives with the purpose of evaluating intrusiveness, emotional response, attitude toward disease, tolerance and expectation; the Paykel's Interview for recent life events in which the subjects had to point out stressful events; STAI Y1 concerning state anxiety and STAI Y2 concerning trait anxiety. We also recruited co-habiting relatives and compared the relative's EE and the EE perceived by patients.

Statistical analyses are still in progress. Our preliminary results suggest that levels of EE are higher among the patients with a diagnosis of EDs, in contrast with results obtained by literature.

We expect that our results will help to shed light on the issue of EE correlates to EDs.