Duncum A J F, Atkins K J, Beilharz F L, Mundy M E
School of Psychological Sciences and Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences, Monash University.
Adv Cogn Psychol. 2016 Mar 31;12(1):39-49. doi: 10.5709/acp-0185-0. eCollection 2016.
Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and clinically concerning body-image concern (BIC) appear to possess abnormalities in the way they perceive visual information in the form of a bias towards local visual processing. As inversion interrupts normal global processing, forcing individuals to process locally, an upright-inverted stimulus discrimination task was used to investigate this phenomenon. We examined whether individuals with nonclinical, yet high levels of BIC would show signs of this bias, in the form of reduced inversion effects (i.e., increased local processing). Furthermore, we assessed whether this bias appeared for general visual stimuli or specifically for appearance-related stimuli, such as faces and bodies. Participants with high-BIC (n = 25) and low-BIC (n = 30) performed a stimulus discrimination task with upright and inverted faces, scenes, objects, and bodies. Unexpectedly, the high-BIC group showed an increased inversion effect compared to the low-BIC group, indicating perceptual abnormalities may not be present as local processing biases, as originally thought. There was no significant difference in performance across stimulus types, signifying that any visual processing abnormalities may be general rather than appearance-based. This has important implications for whether visual processing abnormalities are predisposing factors for BDD or develop throughout the disorder.
患有躯体变形障碍（BDD）以及临床上令人担忧的身体意象担忧（BIC）的个体，在以偏向局部视觉处理的形式感知视觉信息的方式上似乎存在异常。由于倒置会中断正常的整体处理，迫使个体进行局部处理，因此采用了正立 - 倒置刺激辨别任务来研究这一现象。我们研究了具有非临床但高水平BIC的个体是否会以倒置效应减弱（即局部处理增加）的形式表现出这种偏差迹象。此外，我们评估了这种偏差是出现在一般视觉刺激中，还是专门出现在与外貌相关的刺激中，如面部和身体。高BIC组（n = 25）和低BIC组（n = 30）的参与者对正立和倒置的面部、场景、物体及身体执行刺激辨别任务。出乎意料的是，与低BIC组相比，高BIC组表现出增强的倒置效应，这表明感知异常可能并不像最初认为的那样以局部处理偏差的形式存在。不同刺激类型的表现没有显著差异，这意味着任何视觉处理异常可能是普遍存在的，而非基于外貌。这对于视觉处理异常是BDD的诱发因素还是在整个疾病过程中发展而言具有重要意义。
