Reduced automatic approach tendencies towards task-relevant and task-irrelevant food pictures in Anorexia Nervosa.

Background And Objectives: Anorexia Nervosa (AN) patients are characterized by an excessive restriction of their food-intake. Prior research using an Affective Simon Task (AST) with food as a task-irrelevant feature, provided evidence for the view that AN patients' ability to refrain from food is facilitated by reduced automatic approach tendencies towards food. However, because food was task-irrelevant (i.

Evaluative conditioning as a body image intervention for adolescents with eating disorders.

Objective: The aim was to investigate whether a computer-based evaluative conditioning intervention improves body image in adolescents with an eating disorder. Positive effects were found in earlier studies in healthy female students in a laboratory and a field setting. This study is the first to test evaluative conditioning in a clinical sample under less controlled circumstances.

Heightened attentional capture by visual food stimuli in anorexia nervosa.

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa (AN) patients are relatively insensitive to the attentional capture of visual food stimuli. Attentional avoidance of food might help AN patients to prevent more elaborate processing of food stimuli and the subsequent generation of craving, which might enable AN patients to maintain their strict diet. Participants were 66 restrictive AN spectrum patients and 55 healthy controls.

Automatic Approach Tendencies toward High and Low Caloric Food in Restrained Eaters: Influence of Task-Relevance and Mood.

Although restrained eaters are motivated to control their weight by dieting, they are often unsuccessful in these attempts. Dual process models emphasize the importance of differentiating between controlled and automatic tendencies to approach food. This study investigated the hypothesis that heightened automatic approach tendencies in restrained eaters would be especially prominent in contexts where food is irrelevant for their current tasks.

Automatic approach/avoidance tendencies towards food and the course of anorexia nervosa.

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of automatic approach/avoidance tendencies for food in Anorexia Nervosa (AN). We used a longitudinal approach and tested whether a reduction in eating disorder symptoms is associated with enhanced approach tendencies towards food and whether approach tendencies towards food at baseline are predictive for treatment outcome after one year follow up.

Method: The Affective Simon Task-manikin version (AST-manikin) was administered to measure automatic approach/avoidance tendencies towards high-caloric and low-caloric food in young AN patients.

Temporal attention for visual food stimuli in restrained eaters.

Although restrained eaters try to limit their food intake, they often fail and indulge in exactly those foods that they want to avoid. A possible explanation is a temporal attentional bias for food cues. It could be that for these people food stimuli are processed relatively efficiently and require less attentional resources to enter awareness.