Bulimia: disturbed patterns of solitude.

This research suggests that daily solitude has a central role in bulimia. A sample of 15 bulimic patients and 24 normal controls carried electronic pagers for one week and filled out self-reports on their experience in response to randomly timed signals. The bulimics reported the lowest mood states when alone at home, the context in which their symptomatic behavior usually takes place. Further, those who reported the worst experiences in this context were the one's showing the most severe behavioral and affective manifestations of the disorder.