Body dissatisfaction’s been classified as a main diagnostic characteristic of eating disorders. Individuals with eating disorders suffer from severe feelings of unattractiveness, fatness, and characterized by intense body loathing. Cognitive models explain eating disorder symptoms in terms of maladaptive knowledge structures that bias the processing of disorder-relevant information. One type of cognitive bias that’s extensively studied is attentional bias (AB) – the tendency to selectively attend and give priority to disorder-relevant information.

Research shows eating-disorder patients to show an attentional bias for body-and food-related information and specific body parts. Study results showed that eating disorder patients had a dysfunctional way of looking at their own bodies vs a control body. When attending to their own, patients attended more to their self-defined unattractive body parts, whereas healthy people attended more to their own attractive body parts. This pattern was reversed when patients were exposed to another body: patients looked at another body’s attractive parts, healthy people looked at another person’s unattractive parts.

Data suggests that a tendency for selectively attending to one’s own unattractive body parts may maintain or cause severe feelings of body dissatisfaction. This study will experimentally test the role of selective attention for (un)attractive body parts in body (dis)satisfaction to determine whether bias is also causal to (dis)satisfaction.

Study 1

A negative or positive body image bias was temporarily induced, by presenting participants with a picture of their own body and training them to selectively attend to either their three self-defined most unattractive body parts (negative bias training) or their three most attractive body parts (positive bias training).

Hypotheses: a) negative bias training will induce a decrease in body and weight satisfaction, positive bias training will induce an increase in body and weight satisfaction, b) the positive counter induction training will repair body and weight satisfaction.

Method

Participants: Total of 47 undergraduate female students and randomly assigned to either the positive or negative bias training.

Materials and assessment:

• Pictures: pictures taken of participants in their underclothes.
• Individual stimulus selection: participants fill out a questionnaire selecting body parts for the individually tailored bias trainings. Shown a picture of their own body and asked to name and rank all body parts marked from most (10) to least attractive (1).
• Apparatus: participants’ eye movements were recorded. Eye movements were only registered as part of the gazecontingent manipulation that was used – not relevant for the hypotheses.
• Satisfaction and mood: body shape questionnaire used to select participants with a moderate level of body dissatisfaction.
• Attentional bias induction: to induce a temporary attentional bias for the participant’s selfdefined attractive or unattractive body parts, they developed an individually tailored attentional bias induction training. During the training participants were instructed to detect and identify the nature of probes appearing at different locations on a fuzzy background picture of the participant’s body and three neutral objects in the periphery.
• Manipulations: in both conditions the probe appeared on 10% of trials on one of three neutral objects located outside the body. In the negative bias training it appeared on 90% of trials one of the three most unattractive body parts, in positive bias training it appeared on 90% of the trials on one of three most attractive body parts. Negative bias condition participants were given an additional positive bias training of ten minutes serving as a positive counterinduction training.

Procedure: all participants were tested individually. First session – participant photographed in their underwear, then taking the questionnaire to select body parts for the bias training. Second session – a week later, the experimenter inserting the participants self-defined attractive and unattractive body parts in a computer programme. Participant given a range of visual analogue scales measuring body/weight satisfaction, and mood. The eye tracker was placed on the participant’s head as she sat in front of the computer. Participants thought they were taking part in a visual discrimination task. At the end of the 20-minute training, body and weigh satisfaction and mood were measured again. All participants were debriefed in writing after the experiment ended.

Discussion

This study aimed to experimentally test the causal role of selective attention for (un)attractive body parts in the induction of body (dis)satisfaction. It investigated whether training healthy participants to selectively attend to their most unattractive body parts would lead to increased feelings of body/weight dissatisfaction, and if training to attend to their three most attractive body parts would lead to increased feelings of body/weight satisfaction. But the positive counterinduction training did increase body satisfaction in those first assigned to the negative bias induction training. Results also show that participants showed a decrease in mood after bias training – this decrease was smaller for people in the positive condition. This shows that inspecting a picture of one’s own body for 20 minutes negatively affects one’s mood, but when being trained to attend to one’s attractive body parts this effect is less severe than after attention training in unattractive body parts.

The hypothesis that temporarily inducing selective attention for self-defined attractive body parts would lead to increased feelings of body satisfaction as only partly supported. Positive training in healthy women didn’t induce more satisfaction – suggests that it might in general be more difficult to induce positive than negative biases, not just in reasonably satisfied women.

Support was found for the idea that positive training leads to increased body satisfaction: it worked for the group that first received a negative body image bias induction and, consequent of that training, showed a recent significant decrease in body satisfaction. These women had more room for improvement than those assigned to the positive training without preceding negative bias induction, but a more crucial difference may be that their relative dissatisfaction as recently induced and therefore not that tenacious.

Finding that a temporary decrease in body and weight satisfaction could be reversed by training participants to attend to their most attractive body parts shows that changes in a positive direction are possible.

Study 2

To investigate whether the positive bias training will be effective in a sample of women with higher levels of body dissatisfaction, a second study was conducted. Effects of positive bias training were compared with effects of random exposure to the body.

Participants were presented with a picture of their own body, and were trained to either attend to their three most attractive body parts (positive bias training) or to attend to all their body parts (control training). Hypothesis: positive bias training will induce an increase in body/weight satisfaction, whereas the control training won’t lead to changes in body/weight satisfaction.

Method

Participants: 21 female undergraduate students selected on the basis of high score on BSQ invited to participate in a study ostensibly testing relation between perception and concentration. Participants randomly assigned to positive training or control training.

Materials and assessment:

• Pictures: same as study 1
• Individual stimulus selection: select body parts for the individually tailored bias training, participants asked to fill in ‘perception and concentration ranking questionnaire’ – same as study 1.
• Apparatus: participants eye movements registered.
• Satisfaction and mood: same as study 1.
• Attentional bias induction: procedure of positive attentional bias induction similar as study 1, exception that the present training was 15 minutes longer than the previous one. Effects of positive training were compared with effects of control training.
• Manipulations: in both conditions the probe appeared in 10% of the trials on one of three neutral objects located outside the body. In positive training, probe appeared on 90% of trials on one of three attractive body parts, in control training it appeared on 90% of trials randomly on all body parts, except for the participants most attractive and unattractive body parts.

Procedure: procedure exactly the same as study 1.

Discussion

The second study aimed to investigate if positive bias training increased body/weight satisfaction in women highly dissatisfied with their bodies, compared with control training. Hypothesis supported – shown that training highly dissatisfied women to selectively attend to their three attractive body parts led to increased feelings of satisfaction. Conversely, being trained to attend to all body parts didn’t lead to any changes in body/weight satisfaction. Results demonstrated that participants showed a decrease in mood after training – possibly due to repetitive or ‘boring’ nature of the training.

Results show that focusing on one’s own attractive body parts during a 35-miute training session might be a promising intervention for improving women’s body image.

General Discussion

These studies show that how women attend to their bodies can cause them to feel better or worse about themselves. It’s shown that training healthy participants to focus on their more unattractive body parts caused them to feel less satisfied, whereas training highly dissatisfied participants to focus on their more attractive parts cause them to feel more body satisfaction.

Generally, findings provide support for the causal role of selective attention in body (dis)satisfaction. As eating-disorder patients have been shown to selectively attend to their own unattractive body parts, it may be suggested that repeatedly attending to these parts might cause and maintain feelings of body dissatisfaction.

Results of study 2 show that changing the way women dissatisfied with their bodies attend to their bodies leads to positive changes in the way they feel about them.

Training dissatisfied women to attend to their most attractive body parts proved preliminary to be a new technique for improving feelings of body dissatisfaction. However, exposing dissatisfied women to a picture of their own bodies without training them to attend to their bodies in a specific way did not lead to any changes in the way they felt about their bodies – could also be due to the relatively small sample size.

These findings may have implications for the use of body exposure therapy in treatment of eating-disorders.

Finally, though findings are still preliminary and in need of replication, there’s reason to believe that treatment programs may benefit from incorporating procedures to teach eating-disordered and other patients dissatisfied with their bodies to focus more on their beautiful body parts. But a main empirical question remains – does training eating-disorder patients to selectively attend to their most beautiful body parts lead to an increase in body satisfaction. Essentially, we’d want to address this hypothesis in a group of patients who’re at the end of their treatment programs – too risky to expose patients at the beginning of their treatment programs to this kind of training as it may reinforce the glorification of their skinny bodies.

In conclusion, the present findings provide support for the etiological significance of biased attentional processes in body dissatisfaction and provides a new and simple way for improving women’s body image.