Selective attention for unattractive body parts causes body dissatisfaction
E Smeets, Anita T. M. Jansen, T Lindelauf, Anne Roefs · PPmP - Psychotherapie · Psychosomatik · Medizinische Psychologie · 2009
Body dissatisfaction plays a key role in the maintenance of eating disorders and selective attention might be crucial for the origin of body dissatisfaction. Jansen et al., (2005) showed that eating disorder patients attend relatively more to their own unattractive body parts, whereas healthy controls attend relatively more to their own attractive body parts. In the current study, it was investigated whether this bias in selective attention is causal to body dissatisfaction. To test this hypothesis, we trained attention to either onersquor;s self-defined unattractive body parts (i.e., negative bias training) or onersquor;s self-defined attractive body parts (i.e., positive bias training) in 47 healthy female participants while registering eye-movements. The results show that inducing a temporary attentional bias for self-defined unattractive body parts led to a significant decrease in body satisfaction. The positive bias training did lead to a significant increase in body satisfaction but only when it followed the negative bias training. Registration of eye-movements showed that the bias inductions did not lead to long-lasting changes in visual attention. In conclusion, the current study supports the causal role of selective attention for unattractive body parts in the development of body dissatisfaction. Attentional bias - Body dissatisfaction - Eating disorders - Eye-movements - attentional retraining.