Attentional and Memory Biases Among Weight Dissatisfied Young Women: Evidence from a Dichotic Listening Paradigm

Abstract

This study investigated attentional and memory biases within the auditory domain among emerging adult women with high levels of fatness and weight concern. A sample of 116 Chinese undergraduate women screened into groups high and low in self-reported weight dissatisfaction engaged in a dichotic listening task. Participants were instructed to shadow (repeat aloud) neutral passages in the attended ear and respond to visual probes, while ignoring distractors (fat, thin, or neutral words) in the unattended ear. Results indicated that weight dissatisfied women made more shadowing errors in the presence of both fat and thin distractor words compared to weight satisfied women, although groups did not differ in error rates for neutral words. Weight dissatisfied women were also more likely to falsely recognize newly introduced fat words as familiar in a subsequent word recognition task. These effects were maintained after controlling for group differences in body mass index. Findings suggest selective information processing biases related to weight concerns extend to the auditory realm.Keywords Body dissatisfaction Á Attentional bias Á Memory bias Á Dichotic listening Concerns with fatness, weight, and body size are common among adolescent girls and young women and have significant health consequences (e.g., Hoffman and Brownell 1997; Stice and Whitenton 2002). During the past two decades, cognitive-behavioral accounts have garnered considerable interest in explaining weight and body dissatisfaction (e.g., Vitousek and Hollon 1990;Williamson 1996;Williamson et al. 1999). For example, Vitousek and Hollon (1990) posited that people with weight and body image disturbances selectively attend to, appraise, and remember information that is congruent with negative views of their bodies (e.g., fat stimuli), and selectively resist information that is incongruent with positive views of their bodies (e.g., thin stimuli).In support of these contentions, Rieger et al. (1998) found women with eating disorders directed attention away from positive shape words connoting a thin physique and towards negative shape words connoting a large physique in a dot probe study; these results suggested preferential processing of schema-congruent information and impeded processing of schema-incongruent information. In other studies, both clinical and non-clinical samples with body image disturbances devote more attention to threatening body-related information than controls do (e.g., Chen and

The effects of sexual and religious orientations on memory for weight-related stimuli

“…Our findings contradict results reported by Li, Jackson, and Chen (2011), who found that weight dissatisfied women made the most weight-related errors. Though the following results were only of marginal significance, religious, LGBTQ participants had higher EAT scores, indicating weight consciousness.…”

“…In another study by Li, Jackson, and Chen (2011), participants categorized by high and low weight dissatisfaction were presented with a dichotic listening task. While ignoring weight-related and neutral distractors, participants repeated neutral passages as well as attended to visual stimuli.…”

A review of existing measures of attentional biases in body image and eating disorders research

“…Similarly, the dichotic listening task has also provided evidence in support of an attentional bias among non‐clinical analogue samples. Li, Jackson, and Chen () found that individuals with high weight dissatisfaction made more errors in shadowing the attended passage when fat‐ and thin‐related words were presented in the unattended passage, compared to individuals with low weight dissatisfaction. A limitation of the dichotic listening task is that it uses only auditory stimuli and, therefore, the findings do not provide insight into how people attend to visual stimuli which, as mentioned earlier, may have more real‐world implications.…”

Attention to fat- and thin-related words in body-satisfied and body-dissatisfied women before and after thin model priming

“…In a meta-analytic review [ 10 ], Dobson and Dozois concluded that there was no definitive evidence of attentional biases in non-clinical, at-risk (i.e., body-dissatisfied, dieting, or food-restricting) samples of women, whereas there was clear evidence of attentional biases for weight-related words among women with eating disorder diagnoses. However, several recent studies that used a variety of different methods (e.g., eye-gaze tracking, the dot-probe task, and the dichotic listening task) have found evidence of attentional biases in non-clinical at-risk samples [ 11 , 12 , 26 ].…”