Abstract
BackgroundWomen with eating disorders generally perform more poorly on measures of alexithymia, defined as difficulty identifying and describing emotions, and theory of mind, or the ability to infer what others are thinking and feeling. The extent to which these abilities may be influenced by variables such as self-focused attention, or directing attention toward internally generated information, has yet to be investigated. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine differences between women high and low in disordered eating symptoms on measures of emotional awareness and facial affect recognition under conditions of high and low self-focused attention.MethodsUniversity women scoring high or low on a measure of disordered eating (n = 79) were randomly assigned to a condition of high or low self-focused attention. Outcomes included alexithymia (self-rated ability to identify and describe emotions), emotional awareness (ability to describe the emotions of oneself and others), and facial affect recognition. Scores on a measure of negative affect were statistically controlled.ResultsWomen with high disordered eating symptom scores rated themselves as having more difficulties identifying, but not describing emotions after controlling for negative affect, but demonstrated greater difficulties describing their own and others’ emotions on a measure of emotional awareness. In the self-focused attention condition, women scored lower on self emotional awareness and were quicker to identify expressions of negative facial affect regardless of eating disorder symptom status than women in the non-self-focused attention condition. There were no significant interactions between eating disorder status and self-focused attention.ConclusionsFurther examination of different types of emotion recognition and description in oneself and others as well as processes that may influence these abilities is warranted.
Highlights
Women with eating disorders generally perform more poorly on measures of alexithymia, defined as difficulty identifying and describing emotions, and theory of mind, or the ability to infer what others are thinking and feeling
High scoring women rated themselves as having more problems identifying their emotions on a selfreport inventory than low scoring women
Regardless of disordered eating score, women who were videorecorded had greater difficulties describing how they would feel in a social scenario and were quicker at identifying facial expressions of negative emotions than women who weren’t video-recorded
Summary
Women with eating disorders generally perform more poorly on measures of alexithymia, defined as difficulty identifying and describing emotions, and theory of mind, or the ability to infer what others are thinking and feeling. Women with eating disorders score more poorly than healthy controls on self-report measures of alexithymia that assess difficulties identifying and describing emotions [2,3,4,5,6], the results are weaker for women with bulimia nervosa than for women with anorexia nervosa [3, 5]. Difficulties with alexithymia have been found among non-clinical eating disordered samples [5]
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