Abstract
The present study aimed to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI), social anxiety, and eating disorder risk as well as the effects of several demographic variables on social anxiety and eating disorder risk among adolescents in China. Seven hundred eighty-four senior high school students in China were sampled to participate in the survey, completing the measures of body mass index, Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale, and Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and hierarchical regression with bootstrapping approach were used to examine the relationships between the studied variables. Adolescents’ EI negatively influenced their social anxiety and eating disorder risk; meanwhile, their social anxiety acted as a partial mediator between their EI and eating disorder risk. In addition, gender, grade, and body size all had main effects on social anxiety and eating disorder risk, and there were interaction effects both between gender and grade, and between gender and body size. These findings advance our comprehending of the formation mechanism of EDs and should be helpful to conduct effective, targeted intervention on EDs among adolescents.