Emotional functioning in eating disorders: attentional bias, emotion recognition and emotion regulation

Abstract

The data provide support for conceptualizations of EDs that emphasize the role of emotional functioning in the development and maintenance of EDs. Further research will concentrate on exploring whether these findings are state or trait features of EDs.

The influence of variations in eating disorder-related symptoms on processing of emotional faces in a non-clinical female sample: An eye-tracking study

“…This was also confirmed by the continuous analysis, as the location and duration of initial fixations were not related to scores on the EDI subscales. These findings are inconsistent with biases reported in patients with eating disorders (Cardi et al, 2012;Harrison et al, 2010a;Kanakam et al, 2013) and in recovered eating disorder patients (Harrison et al, 2010b) and suggest that the bias might not generalise to healthy participants with non-clinical levels of eating disorder-related symptoms.…”

“…Furthermore, we replicated the medium effect size for the facial emotion recognition deficit and the large effect size for the attention bias to anger reported in Harrison et al (2010a), albeit that our attention bias was in the opposite direction to that predicted. A second limitation concerns the number of stimuli included in the face processing tasks.…”

“…For example, there is a body of evidence demonstrating that patients with eating disorders exhibit impaired facial emotion recognition in comparison to healthy controls (Jänsch et al, 2009;Kucharska-Pietura et al, 2004;Pollatos et al, 2008). This deficit is also evident when participants are restricted to viewing just the eyes (Harrison et al, 2010a;2010b;Russell et al, 2009). Furthermore, similar impairments have been observed in non-clinical participants who could be considered 'at risk' of developing eating disorders (Jones et al, 2009;Ridout et al, 2010;.…”

“…For example, McManus et al (1996) found evidence of biased attention towards emotional words, particularly those connoting threat. Harrison et al (2010a) reported that this bias generalised to faces. They found that, compared with healthy controls, patients with eating disorders experienced greater interference from angry faces on a face-variant of the Stroop task.…”

“…Following this task participants were presented with a separate series of faces and asked to identify the emotion portrayed (eye movements were not collected during this task). Given previous findings of an attention bias to angry faces in patients with eating disorders (Harrison et al, 2010a;b), it was hypothesised that individuals with relatively high EDI scores would demonstrate a greater tendency to initially fixate on the angry faces than would low EDI scorers. It is also expected that those with higher EDI scores would spend longer during these initial fixations looking at the angry faces than would low scorers.…”