Purpose
The present study aimed to explore the implicit associations between food and bodily stimuli in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) and control subjects (HC).
Methods
A Go/No-Go Association ...Task was administrated to 55 participants (28 AN and 27 HC), using food stimuli (low-calorie food vs. high-calorie food) and body stimuli (underweight vs. overweight bodies).
Results
We evidenced an implicit association between food and body stimuli in the AN group, whereas the HC group only showed a tendency. AN and HC groups also exhibited different categorization strategies: the AN group tended to categorize stimuli as low-calorie foods and underweight bodies less than the HC group, and they tended to categorize stimuli as high-calorie foods and overweight bodies more than the HC group.
Conclusion
The present study revealed for the first time specificities of the AN population’s implicit association between food and body stimuli in terms of association strength and categorization strategy. Furthermore, the results suggest that combining implicit methodologies with other methods could contribute to a better characterization of the physiopathology of AN.
Level of evidence
Level I, experimental study.
Recently, neurocognitive studies have shown that food categorization is sensitive to both the properties of the food stimuli (e.g., calorie content) and the individual characteristics of subjects ...(e.g., BMI, eating disorders) asked to categorize these stimuli. Furthermore, groups of patients with eating disorders (ED) were described as relying more on moral criteria to form food categories than were control subjects. The present studies built on these seminal articles and aimed to determine whether certain food properties might trigger moral categories preferentially in subjects suffering from ED and in the general population. Using a Go/No-Go Association Task, Study 1 focused on the extent to which food categories are laden with moral attributes in ED patients compared to control subjects. Study 2 was a follow-up with a different design (an Implicit Association Test), another food variable (calorie content), and two non-clinical subgroups (orthorexic and healthy control subjects). Results revealed for the first time implicit associations between food variables cueing for energy density and moral attributes in the general population, the population suffering from anorexia nervosa, and subjects suffering from disordered eating such as orthorexia nervosa. These findings suggest that moralization of food is a pervasive phenomenon that can be measured with methods reputed to be less vulnerable to self-presentation or social desirability biases.
