Purpose This research sought to check whether the romantic relationship between experiential approval (EA) and treatment result among feeding on disorder (ED) individuals was mediated by motivation. outcome was partially mediated by motivation: increased EA was associated with greater motivation to give up ED behaviors at the beginning of treatment and this led to greater symptom reduction from admission to discharge. Conclusions Motivation appears to be one mechanism by which EA facilitates improved treatment outcomes in EDs. Further development of interventions that promote EA as a means for improving motivation and subsequent ED treatment response may be warranted. (EA; willingness to tolerate or even embrace aversive emotional experiences [15]) may serve to reduce reliance on eating disorder (ED) behaviors as a means of coping with unfavorable affect. With increased acceptance patients may be more willing to endure unfavorable emotions without attempting to modulate their experience in maladaptive ways and will therefore more readily abstain from disordered eating behaviors [16]. Experiential acceptance is considered a core target for behavior change in emerging “third PF-543 wave” cognitive behavioral treatments for eating disorders [13]; for example it is considered to be of particular importance in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) [13 16 17 ACT therapies aim to increase the extent to which a patient behaves in line with his/her personal values rather than acting in service of short-term avoidance of emotional or psychological discomfort [15 16 Empirical evidence supports the clinical relevance of EA during ED treatment; EA is usually negatively associated with baseline severity of ED symptoms [3 18 and increases in acceptance during treatment are associated with greater improvement in ED symptoms [19]. Moreover results from the few pilot studies to date that have directly targeted experiential acceptance are promising: ED severity appears to decline concurrently PF-543 with increases in EA [20 21 Although few studies have examined the means by which EA may promote change it is possible that EA may function by enhancing motivation and subsequent Rabbit Polyclonal to MMP-7. engagement in treatment. This may be of particular importance early on in treatment. When abstaining from symptomatic behaviors during the beginning stages of recovery patients must learn to tolerate an inevitable increase in unfavorable affective experience which had previously been relieved (even if briefly) through indicator use. Healthy alternative coping abilities are discovered but this involves significant period and practice ultimately. If an individual exhibits better acceptance of harmful affective experience first of treatment he/she may tolerate the problems connected with abstinence from ED manners more easily [16]. Subsequently this could correspond to elevated determination/inspiration to stop these behaviors regardless of the useful purpose they serve for the individual. This enhanced inspiration to improve (or simply drop in resistance to improve) could eventually result in better engagement with treatment and therefore greater symptom reduction over time [22]. If this theory holds validity for ED patients EA may be a particularly important target for more severe and treatment-resistant individuals with characteristically low motivation. To our knowledge no studies have tested the extent to which the relationship between EA and treatment outcome can be explained by motivation level among ED patients. The goal of the present study therefore was to replicate previous results demonstrating that early-treatment EA predicts more favorable ED treatment outcomes PF-543 and to test the potential indirect effect of motivation. We hypothesized that: (1) greater EA at baseline would predict greater reductions in ED symptoms during treatment and (2) the relationship between EA and treatment PF-543 outcome would be partially mediated by motivation. We sought PF-543 to test these hypotheses in a sample of eating disorder patients with severe ED psychopathology who require long-term 24-h care. Method Participants and procedures Female patients (= 53) were recruited for participation after admission to a residential.