Do highly body dissatisfied women exhibit attentional biases towards thin and overweight figures?

• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-09-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: attentional bias; body image; Body Dissatisfaction; eye-movement
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2015.66.00015/full

Aims: Body dissatisfaction has been linked as a direct precursor for life threatening eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. Current research indicates that attentional bias may play a key role in the development and maintenance of body dissatisfaction in women due to the constant exposure to media depicted images. Therefore, we conducted an eye-tracking study to investigate whether individuals with high body dissatisfaction show a heightened attentional bias towards images of thin and overweight bodies compared to low body dissatisfied individuals. We also examined whether there was a general tendency for participants to show an attentional bias towards overweight bodies opposed to medium bodies and thin bodies opposed to medium bodies. Method: Thirty six participants completed a body dissatisfaction scale, and subsequently took part in an eye-tracking study. An eye-tracker was used to measure and record both gaze direction and gaze duration frequencies whilst exposing participants to images of females presented for 2000ms. Each trial compared either thin with medium images, or overweight with medium images. Results: Results indicated that overall participants viewed the thin images for a significantly longer time (M=.451, M= .534 respectively) than the overweight images F(1, 34)= 9.806, p = .04, ηp2= .224). However, there were no significant effects of gaze direction towards the thin or overweight bodies. Similarly, no significant effects were obtained for direction or duration bias towards the thin or overweight bodies across the high and low body dissatisfied groups. Conclusions: These data show that overall, participants orient their attention more towards thin body images. However, body dissatisfaction level appears to have no effect on such attentional biases.