Abstract
Prior work suggests that individuals with an eating disorder demonstrate task-based and overall differences in sociocognitive functioning. However, the majority of studies assessed specifically anorexia nervosa and often employed a single experimental paradigm, providing a piecemeal understanding of the applicability of various lab tasks in denoting meaningful differences across diverse individuals. The current study was designed to address these outstanding issues. Participants were undergraduate females who self-identified as having an official (n = 18) eating disorder diagnosis or disordered eating behaviours with no diagnosis (n = 18), along with a control group (n = 32). Participants completed three social tasks of increasing complexity with different outcome measures, namely a gaze cueing task, passive video-watching using eyetracking, and a task to measure preferred social distance. Results diverged as a function of group across tasks; only the control group produced typical social attention effects, the disordered eating group looked significantly more at faces, and the eating disorder group demonstrated a significantly larger preferred social distance. These results suggest variations in task efficacy and demonstrate that altered sociocognitive functioning extends beyond official eating disorder diagnosis.
Highlights
Prior work suggests that individuals with an eating disorder demonstrate task-based and overall differences in sociocognitive functioning
Those individuals who answered NO were eligible to participate as a control participant, and those individuals who answered YES and signed up for the study completed a lab-generated questionnaire, where those individuals who reported having an official diagnosis were classified as the eating disorder group (n = 18, M = 19.1, SD = 0.87; denoted ED; n = 8 currently experiencing ED, n = 10 remitted/recovered ED) and those 18 participants who self-reported experiencing eating disorder symptoms with no formal diagnosis were classified as the disordered eating group (M = 20.3, SD = 2; denoted disordered eating habits (DE); n = 8 currently experiencing ED, n = 10 remitted/recovered ED)
The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of various sociocognitive tasks at stratifying performance across a community sample of women either with or without a formal eating disorder diagnosis, along with controls
Summary
Prior work suggests that individuals with an eating disorder demonstrate task-based and overall differences in sociocognitive functioning. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)[3], borderline personality d isorder[4], social a nxiety[5], and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (AN)[6] and bulimia nervosa (BN)[7] seem to show difficulties with various aspects of social cognition Those with an eating disorder have been found to have challenges with theory of mind[8], emotional functioning[8], and visual processing of body-related stimuli[8,9]. Our investigation’s main aim was to (i) present multiple sociocognitive tasks, increasing in complexity, and (ii) employ a heterogenous, community sample of women who self-report various eating disorder behaviours This was done to ascertain which tasks, if any, could stratify performance based on the way we grouped participants, namely those who self-reported receiving an official eating disorder diagnosis, those who self-reported eating disorder behaviours but no official diagnosis, or controls. To increase ecological validity, we used the preferred interpersonal space task to measure one’s preferred interpersonal space in a social context
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