Eating Disorder - Attentional Bias in Body Dissatisfaction

Attentional Bias in Body Dissatisfaction

Smeets, Jansen, & Roefs (2005) studied body dissatisfaction and its relation to attentional bias. Another aspect to attentional blindness is selective attention. This study tested to determine if selective attention has an impact on eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. The experimenters hypothesized that the eating disorder patients would concentrate and pay more attention to the parts of their bodies that they find unattractive, and the healthy control groups would pay more attention to the parts of their body that they find attractive. The experimenters tested to determine if an experimentally created bias for body parts that are attractive, will help induce body satisfaction in participants who are not happy or satisfied with their bodies. For this experiment the experimenters had the participants use an eye tracker which tracked the parts of their bodies that they defined unattractive or attractive. The results show that the induced bias for unattractive body parts made the participants feel worse about themselves and their body satisfaction decreased and the opposite happened when they showed the participants a positive bias. When the experimenters showed the body-dissatisfied participants the positive body their body satisfaction increased.