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Food cues and peceptual distortion of the female body: Implications for food avoidance in the early dynamics of anorexia nervosa
Author(s) -
Heilbrun Alfred B.,
Flodin Alison
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/1097-4679(198911)45:6<843::aid-jclp2270450603>3.0.co;2-4
Subject(s) - psychology , moderation , anorexia nervosa , anorexia , perception , personality , mechanism (biology) , developmental psychology , eating disorders , stress (linguistics) , clinical psychology , social psychology , medicine , neuroscience , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology
The present studies concerned a perceptual mechanism that could partially explain the anorexic's severe eating restraint despite continuing hunger. If a woman values a thin body, unrealistic perception of food's fattening effects should increase the aversiveness of ingesting food and foster restraint eating. The first study considered the perceived thinness/fatness of women's bodies without and with food cues present. College women who (1) shared the stress‐generating personality characteristics of anorexics (AP); and (2) judged models as fatter after food cues were introduced (enhancers) reported more stress than AP non‐enhancers; no effect of enhancement upon stress was observed in controls. This moderator effect was replicated in a second study. Thus, women with the personality characteristics and high stress that put them at‐risk for anorexia also displayed the perceptual distortion involved in the proposed mechanism. Self‐ratings verified the same perceptual mechanism in the high‐stress AP woman's perception of her own body.