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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1463701

Meta-analytic prospective associations between self-esteem and eating disorders appear to be spurious: A reanalysis and comment on Krauss et al. (2023)

Provisionally accepted
Kimmo Sorjonen Kimmo Sorjonen *Ata Ghaderi Ata Ghaderi Bo Melin Bo Melin
  • Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In a recent meta-analysis, Krauss et al. (2023) found support for a reciprocal model of low self-esteem and eating disorders where, in a vicious circle, low self-esteem makes people more vulnerable to developing eating disorders and eating disorders, in turn, scars individuals’ self-esteem. However, in the present reanalyses of the same meta-analytic data, we found that the prospective effects between self-esteem and eating disorders are likely spurious, meaning they do not reflect a true causal effect, but rather correlations with residuals and regression to the mean. Consequently, the claims by Krauss et al. can be challenged. To avoid statistical artifacts, we recommend researchers to fit, as we did in the present study, complementary models to their data in order to evaluate if prospective effects may be genuinely increasing or decreasing or if they appear to be spurious.

    Keywords: Cross-lagged effects, Eating Disorders, Meta-analysis, overinterpretation of findings, reanalysis, self-esteem, Spurious associations

    Received: 12 Jul 2024; Accepted: 21 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Sorjonen, Ghaderi and Melin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kimmo Sorjonen, Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden

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