Visual Attention to Ambiguous Emotional Faces in Eating Disorders: Role of Alexithymia

Abstract

Eating disorders (EDs) are often accompanied by social-emotional problems. Recently, alexithymia has been suggested to explain objective emotion processing deficits in EDs. We tested if elevated levels of alexithymia may explain emotional face-processing problems in a mixed ED group (N = 24, 19 with anorexia and five with bulimia), comparing them with high-alexithymic (N = 25) and low-alexithymic healthy controls (N = 25). Participants judged the mixture ratio of clear and ambiguous facial emotion blends while eye movements were recorded. The ED group was less accurate judging ambiguous blends containing anger or disgust and attended less to the faces compared with low-alexithymic controls. Reduced attention to faces, in particular the eye region, was linked to confusion with ambiguous anger and disgust in the ED group only. Although significant group differences only emerged compared with low-alexithymic controls, the visual attention patterns underlying the ED group's problems with subtle anger and disgust expressions were not driven by alexithymia. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Visual scanning during emotion recognition in long‐term recovered anorexia nervosa: An eye‐tracking study

“…Eye viewing itself did, however, not differ between ED females and healthy controls (Fujiwara, Kube, Rochman, Macrae-Korobkov, & Peynenburg, 2017). Reduced attention to the eye region during free face viewing was also found in a sample of women with weight-restored AN (Watson, Werling, Zucker, & Platt, 2010).…”

Emotion Recognition in Face and Body Motion in Bulimia Nervosa

“…A recent investigation using blended ambiguous expressions also found that individuals with ED had difficulties judging disgust (Fujiwara et al, ). However, in Fujiwara and colleagues' study, participants with ED experienced difficulties with more ambiguous facial expressions, whereas in this study, the ED participants exhibited worse performance in less ambiguous expressions of disgust.…”

“…A recent study investigated the ability of a mixed sample of participants with BN and AN to judge blended emotions in facial expressions, compared with a group of healthy individuals with high alexithymia and a group with low alexithymia. Results indicated that participants with ED were less accurate judging ambiguous blends containing anger or disgust, compared with participants with low alexithymia (Fujiwara, et al, ). However, only 21% of the ED sample in this study had BN; thus, the ability to recognise emotions in ambiguous, blended facial expressions in people with BN remains largely underexplored.…”

Eye‐tracking research in eating disorders: A systematic review

“…All but one study (Watson et al, 2010) reported mean age of participants (range: 14.4-44.68 years), and only four studies did not report the mean BMI or % ideal body weight (IBW) of at least one participant group (Fujiwara et al, 2017;Stefano Pallanti et al, 1998;Pinhas et al, 2014;Watson et al, 2010). All but one study (Watson et al, 2010) reported mean age of participants (range: 14.4-44.68 years), and only four studies did not report the mean BMI or % ideal body weight (IBW) of at least one participant group (Fujiwara et al, 2017;Stefano Pallanti et al, 1998;Pinhas et al, 2014;Watson et al, 2010).…”

“…studies examined attention while viewing social stimuli. Building on this study,Fujiwara et al (2017) investigated whether differences in eye movements might drive potential difficulties in facial emotion recognition commonly found in those with EDs(Caglar-Nazali et al, 2014). Participants viewed photographs of their own and other female faces, and afterwards rated the attractiveness of parts of the faces.…”