TY - JOUR
T1 - Eating disorder-specific rumination moderates the association between attentional bias to high-calorie foods and eating disorder symptoms
T2 - Evidence from a reliable free-viewing eye-tracking task
AU - Soleymani, Ali
AU - Mazidi, Mahdi
AU - Neimeijer, Renate
AU - de Jong, Peter J
N1 - Funding Information:
Authors acknowledge the extensive help and support provided by master students of the Psychology department of Groningen University who were involved in this project: Frederick Igel, Johanna Jaspers, and Julian Breucker. Authors would like to thank Prof. Sebastiaan Mathot and Yavor Ivanov who helped us to design the eye tracking task and provided us with their valuable feedback. And finally, authors would like to express their deep and sincere gratitude to Fatemeh Kazempourmofrad, who supported and helped us in data collection and analysis.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)
PY - 2022/4/1
Y1 - 2022/4/1
N2 - Cognitive theories of eating disorders implicate Attentional Bias (AB) towards food-related information in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent, and the measures used to examine AB to food-related stimuli typically showed poor reliability. The aim of the current study was twofold. Firstly, we aimed to examine the psychometric properties of a newly devised eye-tracking task for the assessment of AB in the context of eating disorders. Secondly, we examined the role of Eating Disorder-specific (ED-specific) rumination as a potential moderator of the association between attentional bias to food images and eating disorder symptoms. One hundred and three female students were recruited and completed an eye-tracking task comprising 21 matrices that each contained 8 low-calorie and 8 high-calorie food images. Each matrix was presented for 6 s. First fixation location, first fixation latency, and total dwell time were assessed for low and high-calorie food images and the dwell-time based AB measure showed good reliability based on Cronbach's alpha, McDonald's Omega, and split-half method. In addition, the results revealed that the ED-specific rumination plays the hypothesized moderating role. Specifically, while participants with high levels of ED-specific rumination exhibited a positive association between AB to high-calorie foods and eating disorder symptoms, this association was not present among participants with lower levels of ED-specific rumination. The employed free-viewing task seems a reliable measure of AB to food-related stimuli, and the moderation analysis emphasizes the critical role of ED-specific rumination for eating disorder symptoms. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
AB - Cognitive theories of eating disorders implicate Attentional Bias (AB) towards food-related information in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent, and the measures used to examine AB to food-related stimuli typically showed poor reliability. The aim of the current study was twofold. Firstly, we aimed to examine the psychometric properties of a newly devised eye-tracking task for the assessment of AB in the context of eating disorders. Secondly, we examined the role of Eating Disorder-specific (ED-specific) rumination as a potential moderator of the association between attentional bias to food images and eating disorder symptoms. One hundred and three female students were recruited and completed an eye-tracking task comprising 21 matrices that each contained 8 low-calorie and 8 high-calorie food images. Each matrix was presented for 6 s. First fixation location, first fixation latency, and total dwell time were assessed for low and high-calorie food images and the dwell-time based AB measure showed good reliability based on Cronbach's alpha, McDonald's Omega, and split-half method. In addition, the results revealed that the ED-specific rumination plays the hypothesized moderating role. Specifically, while participants with high levels of ED-specific rumination exhibited a positive association between AB to high-calorie foods and eating disorder symptoms, this association was not present among participants with lower levels of ED-specific rumination. The employed free-viewing task seems a reliable measure of AB to food-related stimuli, and the moderation analysis emphasizes the critical role of ED-specific rumination for eating disorder symptoms. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
U2 - 10.1016/j.appet.2022.105934
DO - 10.1016/j.appet.2022.105934
M3 - Article
C2 - 35051543
SN - 0195-6663
VL - 171
JO - Appetite
JF - Appetite
M1 - 105934
ER -