A study is reported that compared the responses of anorexic patients with those of two groups of non‐patient adolescent girls formed by taking the most frequent and the least frequent weighers from a large sample of senior schoolgirls. Each subject completed a questionnaire which related to family conflict, self‐esteem, self‐presentation, behavioural control, and the criticism of eating.A MANOVA was performed, using scores for each variable and pairwise comparisons of the groups. Since the overall test was significant for comparisons between the patients and both of the non‐patient groups, follow‐up tests were carried out. These showed that the patients differed from the non‐patients on a 'global' measure that involved all of the variables except family conflict. Self‐esteem was the only single variable which produced significant differences between any of the groups, and distinguished the patients from the least frequently weighing group of