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Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Published on: October 19, 2014

Threat-related attentional bias in anorexia nervosa

Ilka Schober Dipl-Psych¹, Beth Renwick, Hannah de Jong

¹Section of Eating Disorders, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom; Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Dresden University of Technology, 46, 01187, Dresden, Germany; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Dresden University of Technology, 01307, Dresden, Germany.

The International Journal of Eating Disorders

|November 28, 2013

Abstract

Objective:

Attentional bias (AB) modification treatment targeting general or social anxiety has been recently highlighted as a potential novel approach for the treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN). The purpose of this study was to examine threat-related AB in patients with ANand healthy control participants (HC) and the relationship between AB and eating disorder and other psychopathology.

Method:

Forty-nine female outpatients with AN or Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Anorexia Type (EDNOS-AN), and 44 female HC completed a dot-probe task with threat words and a range of self-report measures assessing eating disorder symptoms and other psychopathology.

Results:

There was no evidence for a differential threat-related AB in AN patients despite elevated anxiety in this group. The AB-index, a parameter of the magnitude of attention allocation when two competing stimuli are presented, did not correlate with any of the self-report measures. However, patients with AN responded significantly more slowly to the probe as compared to controls, regardless of the valence or position of the stimuli.

Discussion:

The results suggest that the AB in AN patients may be specific to eating disorder-relevant anxieties.

Keywords:

ABMT anorexia nervosa anxiety attention attentional bias modification bias eating disorder

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