Body Dissatisfaction Enhances Awareness and Facilitates the Consolidation of Body-Related Words During Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

Man Yi So,Xinyu Wang,Xiao Gao

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02614

Abstract

Attentional biases have received considerable focus in research on cognitive biases and body dissatisfaction (BD). However, most work has focused on spatial allocation of attention. The current two experiments employed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task to investigate attention bias to body-related words in the temporal domain among young females with high and low BD. During this task, there were two targets presented in the same stimulus stream. The first target was defined as target one (T1) and the second was defined as target 2 (T2). Participants were asked to identify T2 while ignoring T1 in single task mode or identify both targets in the dual task mode. In the current study, Experiment 1 assessed the stimulus-driven attention of body-related stimuli. Participants were required to identify a target of neutral word (T2) as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the preceding target (T1) of neutral, fat-, or thin-related words. As expected, we observed spontaneous attentional blink (AB) effects elicited by both fat- and thin-related T1s among participants with high BD, suggesting enhanced awareness of body-related stimuli even when this information does not have to be identified. Such effects did not emerge among participants without BD. Experimental 2 investigated the goal-directed attention of body-related stimuli, during which participants needed to identify both the T1 and neutral T2. Participants with BD showed reduced AB effects after both fat- and thin-related T1, suggesting facilitated consolidation of body-related information in goal-directed attention among participants with BD. These findings have important clinical implications that it provided insight for creating more accurate attention bias modification (ABM) task aiming at reducing and preventing BD among young females.

Highlights

Body dissatisfaction (BD) is one of the prominent risk and maintenance factors for eating disorders (EDs; Stice and Shaw, 2002; Stice et al, 2010)
The neutral T1 elicited attentional blink (AB) effects in the high BD group, such that target 2 (T2) detection was worse at Lag 2 than at Lags 3–5
Comparisons between different T1 categories at different lags in the high BD group showed that T2 detection accuracy at Lag 1 after both fat- and thin-related T1s was lower as compared to those after neutral T1s, indicating that in the high BD group, the magnitudes of AB effects elicited by fat- and thin-related T1s were higher than were those elicited by neutral T1s at Lag 1

Summary

Introduction

Body dissatisfaction (BD) is one of the prominent risk and maintenance factors for eating disorders (EDs; Stice and Shaw, 2002; Stice et al, 2010). There is abundant literature on information processing preferences related to body size and shape, most of which have suggested that attentional biases toward body-related cues contribute to the etiology and maintenance of BD and EDs (Cash and Strachan, 2002; Dobson and Dozois, 2004; Lee and Shafran, 2004). Other cognitive theories of BD suggested that schemas related to appearance, shape, and weight influence processing of body image information (Cash and Labarge, 1996; Williamson et al, 2004)

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Discussion

Conclusion