International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Eating Attitudes Screen (EAS-12)

Twelve statements describe attitudes toward eating, weight and body shape: being preoccupied with thoughts of food, feeling guilty after eating, being terrified of gaining weight, avoiding foods with sugar or fat, feeling that food controls one's life, and being concerned with the desire to be thinner. The statements describe attitudes and preoccupations that, when strong, are associated with eating difficulties.

Garner and Garfinkel (1979) developed the Eating Attitudes Test as an index of the attitudes and behaviors characteristic of anorexia nervosa, and attitudinal screens of this kind have since been used widely to identify people who might benefit from further assessment. This screen was written for this site in the style of the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), approximating that kind of attitudinal content in a short, freely usable form.

The twelve ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe stronger preoccupation with food, weight and shape; lower scores describe a more relaxed relationship with eating. A high score is a reason for a careful conversation with a qualified professional, not a diagnosis.

The screen is used for self-reflection, in student and primary care settings and in research. On this site, the SCOFF questionnaire asks five direct questions about eating disorder signs, the Self-Esteem scale describes overall self-regard, and the Perfectionism and Intrusive Thoughts scale describes high standards that often accompany eating concerns.

The two subscales (disordered eating attitudes, weight-shape concern) operationalize well-established clinical constructs validated across eating disorder research. Items were constructed in the style of the IPIP tradition to avoid copyright while capturing the same clinical domains.

“Worry a great deal about gaining weight.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.