The effect of fasting on attentional biases for food and body shape/weight words in high and low Eating Disorder Inventory scorers.
OBJECTIVE
To assess attentional biases associated with food and body shape/weight words in fasted and nonfasted high and low Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2) scorers.


METHODS
Subjects were 56 female first-year undergraduate psychology students, aged 17-24 years, participating for course credit. High and low scorers on the Drive for Thinness and Body Dissatisfaction subscales of the EDI-2 completed alternative modified dot probe tasks containing food words, body shape/weight words, and control words, under fasted and nonfasted conditions.


RESULTS
Fasting increased attentional bias toward high-calorie food words across all subjects. High EDI-2 scorers also showed an attentional bias toward low-calorie words, but only when nonfasted.


CONCLUSIONS
Food-related attentional biases, commonly observed in eating disorder patients, may reflect a pervasive concern with food-related stimuli as opposed to being simply a product of chronic hunger. That is, with increasing hunger, high EDI-2 scorers shift their focus away from low-calorie foods to high-calorie foods. This result suggests an attentional bias basis for the cycle of high-calorie binging when hungry and low-calorie food selections when less hungry.
Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
Jennifer L
JL
Placanica
Gavin J
GJ
Faunce
R F
RF
Soames Job
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001828:Body Image; D001835:Body Weight; D002032:Bulimia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D002149:Energy Intake; D005215:Fasting / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005518:Food Preferences; D006801:Humans; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary