Abstract
Three groups of women: eating disorder, body dysphoric controls, and nonsymptomatic controls, participated in an experiment testing hypotheses derived from cognitive-behavioral theories of eating disorders. In phase 1, participants encoded ambiguous information via instructions to imagine themselves in a variety of ambiguous situations that involved two types of information: body-related or health-related. On a subsequent memory task, participants in the eating disorder group and the body dysphoric control group recalled imagery of the body-related situations with a fatness interpretation and participants in the nonsymptomatic control group recalled imagery with a thinness interpretation. The three groups did not differ in their interpretation of the health-related situations. In phase 2, participants were instructed to imagine themselves in each body-related situation, but were explicitly instructed to imagine the scenes with either a positive or negative interpretation. Results indicated that the eating disorder and body dysphoric groups were able to change their interpretation of body-related information when instructed to do so.
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Williamson, D.A., Perrin, L., Blouin, D. et al. Cognitive bias in eating disorders: Interpretation of ambiguous body-related information. Eat Weight Disord 5, 143–151 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354444
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354444