Attentional biases in eating psychopathology. The role of vigilance and avoidance

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated attentional biases towards emotional stimuli in eating disordered individuals. However, these findings are limited due to greater response latencies reflecting either bias towards (vigilance) or away from a stimulus (avoidance). Consequently, the present study aimed to unravel these two distinct attentional processes in a sample of sub-clinical disordered eaters. Thirty females were assigned to high ( n = 15) and low ( n = 15) groups based on their scores on the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI-2). Eye-tracking was used to examine continuous attention deployment in both groups during free visual exploration of a series of faces depicting angry, happy and neutral expressions. Analysis of the gaze data suggested that the high EDI group initially deploy attention to emotion in the same way as low EDI individuals. However, it is only after an initial phrase, whereby a particular stimulus is encoded and identified as an emotional expression that disordered eaters begin to avoid this image. Specifically, higher scores on the drive for thinness subscale were found to predict attentional disengagement from angry expressions. The processing of emotional information therefore appears to be dependent upon both the type of eating psychopathology and its associated disorder-specific dysfunctional cognitions.