Cass John, Giltrap Georgina, Talbot Daniel
School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 22;10:2821. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02821. eCollection 2019.
One factor, believed to predict body dissatisfaction is an individual's propensity to attend to certain classes of human body image stimuli relative to other classes. These attentional biases have been evaluated using a range of paradigms, including dot-probe, eye-tracking and free view visual search, which have yielded a range of - often contradictory - findings. This study is the first to employ a classic compound visual search task to investigate the relationship between body dissatisfaction and attentional biases to images of underweight and with-overweight female bodies. Seventy-one undergraduate females, varying their degree of body dissatisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI), searched for a horizontal or vertical target line among tilted lines. A separate female body image was presented within close proximity to each line. On average, faster search times were obtained when the target line was paired with a uniquely underweight or with-overweight body relative to neutral (average weight only) trials indicating that body weight-related images can effectively guide search. This search effect was stronger for individuals with high eating restraint (a behavioral manifestation of body image disturbance) when search involved a uniquely underweight body. By contrast, individuals with high BMIs searched for lines more rapidly when paired with with-overweight rather than underweight bodies, than did individuals with lower BMIs. For trials - in which a unique body was paired with a distractor rather than the target - search times were indistinguishable from neutral trials, indicating that the deviant bodies neither compulsorily "captured" attention nor reduced participants' ability to disengage their attention from either underweight or with-overweight bodies. These results imply the existence of attentional strategies which reflect one's current body and goal-directed eating behaviors.
一个被认为可预测身体不满的因素是个体相对于其他类别，对特定类别人体形象刺激的关注倾向。这些注意力偏差已通过一系列范式进行评估，包括点探测、眼动追踪和自由视图视觉搜索，这些研究产生了一系列往往相互矛盾的结果。本研究首次采用经典的复合视觉搜索任务，以调查身体不满与对体重过轻和超重女性身体图像的注意力偏差之间的关系。71名本科女性，她们的身体不满程度和体重指数（BMI）各不相同，在倾斜的线条中寻找水平或垂直的目标线。在每条线的附近会呈现一张单独的女性身体图像。平均而言，当目标线与独特的体重过轻或超重身体配对时，相对于中性（仅平均体重）试验，搜索时间更快，这表明与体重相关的图像可以有效地引导搜索。当搜索涉及独特的体重过轻身体时，对于具有高饮食抑制（身体形象障碍的一种行为表现）的个体，这种搜索效应更强。相比之下，高BMI个体在与超重而非体重过轻的身体配对时，比低BMI个体搜索线条的速度更快。对于目标与干扰物而非目标配对的试验，搜索时间与中性试验没有区别，这表明异常身体既不会强制“吸引”注意力，也不会降低参与者将注意力从体重过轻或超重身体上转移的能力。这些结果意味着存在反映一个人当前身体和目标导向饮食行为的注意力策略。
