The Eating Pathology Symptoms Inventory (EPSI)

The Eating Pathology Symptoms Inventory, or EPSI, (pronounced ‘ep-see’) is a multidimensional self-report measure developed to assess eating disorder pathology among a wide variety of populations. This measure, created by members of the CARE Lab, is a 45-item questionnaire that has eight scales, including body dissatisfaction, binge eating, cognitive restraint, purging, restricting, excessive exercise, and negative attitudes toward obesity and muscle building. 

Current measures of eating-disorder psychopathology are narrow in scope (e.g., assessing only one aspect of disordered eating, such as disinhibited eating) or have serious limitations (e.g., gender biases, inconsistent factor structures, and poor discriminant validity).

The EPSI has been tested in > 30,000 individuals and demonstrated strong evidence for test-retest reliability, internal consistency, and convergent/discriminant validity across a range of samples, and most scales (except Muscle Building) are invariant across cisgender men and cisgender women (Forbush et al., 2014).  Furthermore, our recent work found that the EPSI scales are invariant in a large sample of adolescent (n=5,250) and adult (n=24,571) patients with an ED (Richson et al., 2021), making our system ideal for assessing eating disorder psychopathology across the lifespan, in both clinical and research settings.

The EPSI was designed to be a more inclusive eating pathology measure that is able to assess eating disorders across a range of populations accurately. The EPSI has less gender and weight category bias (Forbush et al., 2013; Forbush et al., 2020), a more replicable factor structure than other traditional eating disorder measures, and stronger criterion validity for distinguishing among individuals with different types of eating disorders compared to other established measures of eating pathology (Forbush et al., 2013; Forbush et al., 2014). The factor structure also replicates in non-Western cultures (Tang et al., 2015; Sahlan et al., 2022).