Attention Biases of Undergraduate Women with Fat Negative Physical Self: Orienting or Maintenance

Abstract

Fat Negative Physical Self (FNPS) is defined as negative cognition, emotion and behavior regarding the self as fat. There are some studies on attention biases for fat-related information among FNPS individuals. However, researchers assume that the central feature of attention biases in the FNPS is attention orienting, which means that fat-related information attracts the initial attention of FNPS individuals. The present study raises doubt about this view. Another possibly more salient attention bias in FNPS individuals is of that attention maintenance, wherein fat stimuli are difficult to disengage from after they have been detected. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis. Participants were assigned to experimental and control groups from their scores on the Negative Physical Self Scale-Fat (NPSS-F, Chen, Jackson, Huang, 2006). Experiment 1a used a cuing paradigm and the SOA was set to 300ms, in order to study orienting versus disengagement components of attention bias. Experiment 1b used the same paradigm as experiment 1a, with the exception that the cueing materials were body figure pictures and vase silhouette. In experiment 2, we modified the paradigm so that participants had to identify letters that might be located around pictures which were presented on the center of the monitor. The results of experiment 1a and 1b were consistent with the hypothesis. The results of Experiment 2 suggested that attention was maintained on the fat body figure longer than on the thin body figure. However, another unexpected result was that time focused on the normal body figure was also longer than that of the thin body figure. Further analyses indicted results of Experiment 2 were not a function of BMI but instead a result of heighted fatness concern. In conclusion, we found that attention of female college students with high FNPS levels reflected more maintenance than initial orienting towards fatness stimuli.