Implicit Affect Toward Food and Weight in Individuals With Anorexia Nervosa (2012)

Undergraduates: Victoria Spring, Joseph C. Franklin

Faculty Advisor: Cynthia Bulik
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Eating disorders are serious psychiatric illnesses with a lifetime prevalence for anorexia nervosa (AN) of around 1% among women. AN has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Despite considerable research, little is known about predictors of severity and recovery from AN.

Implicit attitudes are automatic thoughts and feelings people have toward a stimulus. Measures of implicit affect more powerfully explain and predict behavior than explicit attitudes or measures of implicit association. The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is a dynamic new measure of implicit affect that has never before been applied to the study of psychopathology.

The present study attemps to address the gaps in our understanding of AN by employing the AMP to measure implicit affect towards eating disorder stimuli in female healthy controls, inpatients with AN, and women recovered from AN.

Results supported our hypotheses that women with AN display negative implicit affect toward images of overweight individuals and of high-calorie foods. However, implicit affect toward low-calorie food and underweight individuals in women with AN was not significantly different from other groups. Recovered women were found to be similar to controls in their implicit affect toward all stimuli except high-calorie food, toward which they had a neutral response.