Affiliation:
1. Department of Psychology, School of Education Soochow University Suzhou China
2. College of Teacher Education Lishui University Lishui China
3. Research Center for Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Soochow University Suzhou China
Abstract
AbstractAlthough many studies have investigated attentional biases toward weight‐related information among individuals with weight dissatisfaction, the mechanisms underlying the processing of task‐irrelevant and spatial‐irrelevant weight‐related information as distractors remain unclear. Participants were assigned to groups according to their levels of weight dissatisfaction to address this question. Participants with high weight dissatisfaction (HWD) were assigned to the experimental group; those with low weight dissatisfaction (LWD) were assigned to a control group. By recording event‐related potentials during a visual search task along the median vertical line, fatness‐related/thinness‐related/neutral words and scrambled strokes were presented horizontally in pairs as task‐irrelevant distractors. The results showed that intact words facilitated fast attentional orienting compared to scrambled strokes, as revealed by the significant N2pc for all types of intact words for both the HWD and LWD groups. More importantly, only fatness‐ and thinness‐related words elicited the evident PD in the HWD group, and the PD amplitudes were larger in the HWD group compared to the LWD group. These findings suggest that weight‐related distractors were actively suppressed after initial attentional orienting among females with HWD. This reveals the mechanisms of attentional biases toward weight‐related information among females with HWD and contributes to the model of the cognitive‐behavioral theory of body image disturbance. These results may help enhance prevention and interventions for reducing weight dissatisfaction.
Funder
National Basic Research Program of China
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology,Biological Psychiatry,Cognitive Neuroscience,Developmental Neuroscience,Endocrine and Autonomic Systems,Neurology,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology,General Neuroscience