Preliminary development of an implicit association test to measure body dissatisfaction and predict disordered eating...

We conducted a preliminary test of a novel implicit association test for body dissatisfaction (BD-IAT). We predicted that BD-IAT would correlate with self-reported BD and predict later eating disorder (ED) attitudes. Female undergraduates (N = 145) self-reported BD and ED attitudes. In the BD-IAT, participants sorted words related to "satisfaction" and "dissatisfaction" to opposite sides of a computer screen. Participants categorized pictures of themselves to the side of the screen with the word "Me," which appeared with the "satisfied" or "dissatisfied" category in separate blocks. The BD-IAT measured the strength of the association between a participant's own body and dissatisfaction. The BD-IAT correlated positively with the EDI-BD (r = 0.21, p < 0.05), supporting its convergent validity. The BD-IAT predicted ED attitudes at one-week follow-up, controlling for explicit BD and baseline ED (b = 0.58, SE = 0.23, t = 2.57, p = .01); IAT scores uniquely accounted for 4.7 % of the variance in ED at one-week follow-up. These results provide preliminary evidence for the BD-IAT as an implicit measure of BD and suggest that it may predict future ED attitudes above and beyond explicit BD. Directions for future work aimed at continued development of this task are discussed.