Eating disorder symptomatology and body mass index are associated with readers' expectations about character behavior: Evidence from eye‐tracking during reading

Abstract

Objective Many theories have been put forward suggesting key factors underlying the development and maintenance of eating disorders, such as: unhealthy food‐related cognitive biases, negative body attitude, and perfectionism; however, underlying cognitive processes associated with eating disorder symptomatology remain unclear. We used eye‐tracking during reading as a novel implicit measure of how these factors may relate to eating disorder symptomatology. Method In two experiments, we monitored women's eye movements while they read texts in which the characters' emotional responses to food‐, body image‐, and perfectionism‐related scenarios were described. Participants' eating disorder symptomatology was then assessed. Results Both studies suggest that moment‐to‐moment processing of characters' emotional responses to perfectionism‐, and to a lesser extent, body image‐related information was associated with participants' eating disorder symptomatology, thus supporting theories in which these factors are key to developing and maintaining eating disorders. Interestingly, the moment‐to‐moment processing of characters' emotional responses to food‐related scenarios was not related to eating disorder symptomatology. Discussion These findings provide novel insights into cognitive processes underlying eating disorder symptomatology, as well as demonstrating the utility of more natural implicit measures.

What is the relationship between body mass index and eating disorder symptomatology in professional female fashion models?

“…Instead, we used the EDE-Q, which is a validated and reliable questionnaire that can provide a reasonable approximation of eating disorder symptoms, shown to be comparable to the clinical evaluation tool (the EDE) (Berg et al, 2012). It is also important to note that, as has been found in other studies (Ralph-Nearman & Filik, 2018), the EDE-Q scores also differed slightly from those from another community sample of young females from Australia (Mond et al, 2006). This is perhaps not unusual, as eating disorder symptomatology may vary across cultures (Mond et al, 2006;Tozzi et al, 2005).…”

An eye-tracking study examining the relationship between males’ eating disorder symptomatology, body mass index, and expectations about character behaviour in text

“…However, specific cognitive biases have been detected with this tool related to both BMI and eating disorder symptoms (see e.g., Ralph-Nearman et al, 2019, for a review). One recent study aimed to investigate information processing strategies under more natural conditions, specifically, by tracking eye movement behaviour during a natural reading task (Ralph-Nearman & Filik, 2018a). In this prior study, female participants had their eye movements monitored while they read body-, food-, or perfectionism-related texts in third-person perspective (Experiment 1) or second-person perspective (Experiment 2).…”

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

“…While these explicit measures have provided a useful means of assessing the broad emotional consequences of verbal irony, they can be limited by response biases and errors, necessarily involve disruption to processing, and do not assess processing in real-time. More recently, a few studies have applied online measures, such as eventrelated brain potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking, to investigate how readers keep track of temporal and emotional shifts in stories, and have demonstrated that readers are sensitive to mismatches between a character's expected and described emotional states (Komeda, & Kusumi, 2006;Leuthold, Filik, Murphy, & Mackenzie, 2012;Ralph-Nearman & Filik, 2018;Rinck, & Bower, 2000;Vega, 1996;Zwaan, 1996).…”