Enfacement illusions: Filling a knowledge gap in eating disorder risk assessment, prevention, and intervention?

Abstract

Body image disturbance (BID) is central to eating disorders (EDs), yet the role of self‐face perception has received limited empirical attention despite rising sociocultural pressures emphasizing facial appearance through technologies such as social media. Emerging evidence suggests impairments in self‐face recognition accuracy and distorted perceptions of facial appearance among individuals with EDs. Enfacement illusions, involving the experimental induction of perceived ownership over another's face, offer a novel paradigm to comprehensively investigate the perceptual multisensory integration processes underlying self‐face perception disturbances in ED populations. Such an approach may hold promise for elucidating core pathological mechanisms contributing to BID and ED psychopathology. We discuss how rigorous investigation of self‐face perception through the enfacement illusion paradigm represents an innovative direction of research and/or clinical application that may advance etiological models of EDs and possibly inform interventions targeting the potentially multidimensional nature of body and facial image disturbances characterizing EDs.Public Significance StatementBody image disturbance is central to eating disorders (EDs), yet, the role of face‐related disturbances remains critically under‐investigated. After summarizing findings on face‐related disturbances in EDs we propose how enfacement illusions (i.e., the experimental induction of ownership over another's face) may elucidate self‐face perception disturbances in EDs, and their underlying mechanisms. Enfacement illusions may also offer an intervention to potentially address multifaceted face and body image disturbances characterizing EDs.

Whose body is it anyway? Cultural reflections on embodiment illusion research in eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder

“…Eye tracking and fMRI could elucidate cross-cultural differences in neural processes underlying illusion susceptibility and post-illusion improvements in image disturbances. Nuanced measures of face image disturbance are also needed, such as those capturing different components (e.g., dissatisfaction, concern, adiposity, avoidance, checking, contemplating surgery) and different facial features (e.g., eyes, nose) ( 48 , 53 ).…”