Greater body appreciation moderates the association between maladaptive attentional biases and body dissatisfaction in undergraduate women

Abstract

Attentional biases for weight-related information are thought to contribute to maintenance of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. Women with greater body appreciation may pay less attention to thinideal cues if body appreciation protects them from negative effects of thin-ideal media, and if so, they may be less susceptible to development of maladaptive attentional biases. The present study used eye-gaze tracking to measure attention to weight-related words/images in 167 body-dissatisfied undergraduate women (aged 17-39 years) to examine the associations among body dissatisfaction, body appreciation, and attentional biases. Participants viewed displays of thin-related, fat-related, and neutral words/images while their eye fixations were tracked over 8-s intervals. We hypothesized body appreciation (as measured by the Body Appreciation Scale) would moderate the documented association between body dissatisfaction and attentional biases for thin-related information only, such that as body appreciation increased, the strength of the relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional biases would decrease. Results indicated that body appreciation moderated the association between body dissatisfaction and attentional biases for thin-related words only. With low body appreciation, body dissatisfaction was positively associated with attention to thinrelated words. With high body appreciation, there was an inverse association between body dissatisfaction and attention to thin-related words. Results suggest that body appreciation may be an effective prevention target for reducing maladaptive attentional biases.

The Effect of Attention on Body Size Adaptation and Body Dissatisfaction

“…The dot probe task has previously been shown to have poor internal consistency and test-retest reliability [55,[65][66][67], which may explain why studies using the dot probe task report inconsistent results for the relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional bias towards low fat bodies. In contrast, studies using eye-tracking measures consistently report a positive relationship [16][17][18][19]. Given the poor reliability of the dot probe task as a measure of attentional bias, we should interpret our results for ΔAB with caution.…”

“…Body size adaptation is also indirectly related to body dissatisfaction, with this relationship being mediated by visual attention. Eye-tracking [16][17][18][19] and reaction time [20][21][22] studies show that people with high body dissatisfaction direct more attention towards low fat body stimuli than people with low body dissatisfaction. Further, Stephen and colleagues demonstrated that people adapt to the body size they direct more attention towards.…”

The relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional bias to thin bodies in Malaysian Chinese and White Australian women: A dot probe study.

“…The absence of an association also contrasts with studies using eye-tracking as a measure of attentional bias (e.g. Stephen et al, 2018;Tobin et al, 2019).…”

“…Skinner et al, 2018) and have consistently produced evidence for a relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional bias to thin bodies (e.g. Stephen et al, 2018;Tobin et al, 2019). Therefore, future research may employ eye-tracking techniques to investigate the moderating effects of ethnicity and ethnicity-congruency on the relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional bias to body size.…”

“…High levels of body dissatisfaction are associated with multiple appearance-related cognitive biases (Rodgers and DuBois, 2016). For example, women reporting high levels of body dissatisfaction, in comparison to women with low levels of body dissatisfaction, tend to direct more attention towards thin bodies, as demonstrated by studies using eye-tracking (Stephen et al, 2018;Tobin et al, 2019) and dot probe tasks (Dondzilo et al, 2017;Joseph et al, 2016;Moussally et al, 2016) as measures of attentional bias. The dot probe task presents participants simultaneously with a thin body stimulus alongside a control stimulus (e.g., a non-thin body or a non-body object).…”