Selective processing of eating disorder relevant stimuli: Does the Stroop Test provide an objective measure of bulimia nervosa?

Neuropsicologia dos transtornos alimentares: revisão sistemática da literatura

“…3) Selective attention Using the emotional Stroop task, for ED, Black et al 5 did not observe an attentional bias for words associated with eating and body shape. Lovell et al, 37 also using the Stroop test, compared 24 patients with current BN, 11 bulimic patients with symptom remission and 33 normal controls.…”

Neuropsychology of Bulimia Nervosa: New Findings

“…Additionally, Cooper and Fairburn (1993) found that in the case of patients with BN, the interference is caused by the frequency of purging and not by the general psychiatric symptoms, however, Black et al (1997) consider that the differences between bulimic patients and normal controls, do not establish a specific cognitive impairment in these patients. Jones-Chesters et al (1998) found that the words associated with food, diet, weight and shape, causing a marked interference and increased latency to name the color of the words in patients with BN compared to control group.…”

“…Also, with regard to the findings of the Stroop, Huon (1995) argues that it is necessary to establish a theoretical framework for understanding the processes underlying such biases. Vitousek and Hollon (1990) consider that the methods used to examine cognitive biases in anxiety and depression should not only be transferred to the study of ED, besides, these studies require a theoretical foundation that needs to be tested empirically, since without clearly established theories that produce specific hypotheses, models of cognitive processing in patients with ED will be useless (Black et al, 1997). In addition, tests of cognitive processing may be useful to test cognitive theories as they provide a more objective method to assess the processes, compared with self tests.…”

Frontal-parietal responses to “oddball” stimuli depicting “fattened” faces are increased in successful dieters: An electroencephalographic study

“…A bulk of previous studies has used variants of Stroop Naming task to probe the interference effects of naming food and body size, namely "Food Stroop" and "Body Stroop" tasks (Ben-Tovim et al, 1989;Channon et al, 1988). Compared with normal weight (control) subjects, bulimic and anorexic patients demonstrated a remarkable interference effect during the performance of the Food and/or Body Stroop tasks (Ben-Tovim et al, 1989;Black et al, 1997;Jones-Chesters et al, 1998;Channon et al, 1988;Lovell et al, 1997). On the contrary, no difference was found between dieters or restrained eaters versus control subjects in the performance of the Food and Body Stroop tasks (Mahamedi and Heatherton, 1993;Green and Rogers, 1993).…”