Abstract
Eating disorder tendencies are psychological characteristics that are prevalent in healthy young females and are known to be among the risk factors for eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. People with greater eating disorder tendencies strongly associate sweet and fatty foods with weight gain and strictly avoid consuming such foods. However, little is known about how eating disorder tendencies influence the association between taste and body shape impression. Research on crossmodal correspondences suggests that people preferentially associate sweet tastes with round shapes, and individual differences affect the degree of such associations. This study investigates how the degree of taste-shape matching is related to eating disorder tendencies with a preliminary investigation of what mediates this relationship. Two experiments were conducted: in Experiment 1, healthy participants rated the degree of association between basic taste words (sweet/sour/salty/bitter) and roundness of shape and subsequently completed questionnaires addressing eating disorder tendencies. In Experiment 2, participants answered additional questionnaires addressing obsessiveness, dichotomous thinking, and self-esteem. The results of Experiment 1 indicated a positive correlation between drive for thinness, which is one indicator of an eating disorder tendency, and the degree of matching sweetness to round shape. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 and revealed the mediating effect of obsessiveness. These findings suggest a relationship between individual differences in taste-shape matching and eating disorder tendency and the preliminary mediating role of obsessiveness. The present study provides new insight into the role of sweet-round matching in eating disorder tendencies and the associated psychological mechanisms.
Highlights
The analysis demonstrated that the degree of sweet–round matching was positively correlated with drive for thinness (r = 0.179, p = 0.023; Fig. 2, left)
Sweet–round matching was positively correlated with obsessiveness (r = 0.166, false discovery rate (FDR)-corrected p-value = 0.032)
Our findings reveal that eating disorder tendencies are associated with the degree of taste–shape matching
Summary
Participants who had recovered from eating disorders exhibited different patterns of sensitization to repetitive sweet stimuli, as compared to those exhibited by healthy people (Wagner et al, 2015). This difference in sensitization patterns was supported by a neuroimaging study that observed varying brain activity in the insula, which contains the primary gustatory cortex (Pritchard et al, 1999; Oberndorfer et al, 2013). Given that individuals with greater eating disorder tendencies avoid sweet foods to prevent weight gain and may strongly associate their body shape with sweet tastes, eating disorder tendencies may relate to the associations between shape and taste perceptions
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