Concerns about physical appearance are a salient feature of several psychiatric conditions, and various self-report-based measures of appearance concerns have been developed for different disorders. An important question, with implications for understanding comorbidity and processes underlying it, is whether these different measures may in fact be indexing a common construct. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a large mixed-sex undergraduate sample (N = 704), the current study found evidence for a higher-order factor accounting for substantial shared variance in measures of appearance concerns devised for use with eating disorders, social anxiety disorder, and body dysmorphic disorder. Hierarchical mediation analyses revealed that this general factor accounted for much of the variance shared between each appearance concerns measure and scale-assessed symptoms of its affiliated disorder. Additionally, the general appearance concerns factor accounted for most of the variance in a shared disorder factor representing the comorbidity among eating, social anxiety, and body dysmorphic symptoms. Collectively, these findings suggest that appearance concerns are general and transdiagnostic rather than disorder specific and may contribute to the systematic comorbidity evident among appearance-related psychopathologies.

对外表的担忧是几种精神疾病的显着特征，并且已经针对不同的疾病制定了各种基于自我报告的外表担忧测量方法。一个重要的问题是，这些不同的衡量标准实际上是否可能索引一个共同的结构，这对理解合并症及其背后的过程具有影响。当前的研究在一个大型混合性别本科生样本（N  = 704）中使用验证性因素分析（CFA），发现了一个高阶因素的证据，该因素解释了为饮食失调、社交障碍而设计的外表问题测量中的巨大共同方差。焦虑症和身体变形障碍。分层中介分析显示，这个一般因素解释了每种外观关注指标与其附属疾病的量表评估症状之间共享的大部分差异。此外，一般外观问题因素解释了代表饮食、社交焦虑和身体畸形症状之间共病的共同障碍因素的大部分差异。总的来说，这些发现表明，外表问题是普遍的、跨诊断的，而不是特定于疾病的，并且可能导致与外表相关的精神病理学中明显的系统性共病。