Directed Memory And Directed Forgetting In Women With Fat Negative Physical Self: Behavioural And ERP Studies

Nowadays, more and more attention has been given to the body. body image study has become a hot spot in psychological research. Physical self is the self-awareness of one's own body, it is positive correlated with the mental health. The Negative physical self (NPS) is the negative perception, negative emotional experience and corresponding behavior conditioning. In current society, The fat negative physical self (FNPS) is a common phenomenon as the living standards improved and thin ideal popularized. The fat negative physical self is one of the risk factors of eating disorder and body image disturbance. For the sake of providing theoretic guidance to keep FNPS away from being clinical patient, the studies on it appear necessary.The cognitive-behavioral account of negative physical self has suggested that they have negative self-schematas which are highly efficient knowledge structures about one's body size and shape. these schematas influence cognitive processing about one's body. This bias may act as maintenance factors in their psychopathology. So, it is very important to study their cogonitive biases. Some preliminary study have been done on negative physical self'attention, coding, interpretation and memory bias, but most of those studies used clinical samples, only a few researches paid attention to the high risking none clinical samples. especially in the domain of memory research, the existing researches have only investigated the unintentional memory bias.current study will use directed forgetting method to investigate the memory bias from a new angle of view——intentional memory and intentional forgetting.This research unite behavior method and the technique of Event-related brain potentials to investigate directed memory and directed forgetting bias of FNPS. It consists of three parts: Experiment 1 and experiment 2 is behavior studies with words as materials. Experiment 3 is an ERP study with pictures as materials. In experiment 1, we use the item method of directed forgetting to investigate the recall and recognize bias of FNPS(experiment 1). following with that, in experiment 2, we add a dot detect task to the learning stage of directed forgetting in order to inverstigate the coding bias of FNPS (experiment 2). In experiment 3, Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) is used to investigate the neural processing when FNPS remember body pictures. We record the cording stage and retrieval stage separately.After analyzing, we have obtained the following conclusions:(1) To directed memory the words, the FNPS need more resource to remember thin words than the control subjects in coding stage. In the retrieval stage, they recall more TBR (To-be-rememberred) fat words. (2) To directed memory the pictures, ERP results in coding stage showed that:To remember fat words elicited a more negative ERP deflection than did thin words between 300-600 ms (P3) for FNPS women, which might reflect the subjects process this word type with less resource. ERP result in recognize stage showed That To remember fat words elicited a more positive ERP component than did thin and neutral words between 600-1000 ms (LPC) for FNPS women, The LPC might reflect a memory process such as recollect intentionally. (3) To directed forgetting the words, the FNPS need more resource to forget fat words than the control group in coding stage. In the retrieval stage, they recall more TBF (To-be-forgetted) fat words than the neutral words, but the control subjects didn't show such difference. (4) the results from directed forgetting pictures showed that there is no differences between the two groups both in coding and retrieval stage, the results above had offered new evidence of fat negative physical self schema can influences our directed memory and directed forgetting, but there is no differece between the two groups in there retrieval TBF words and picture materials. Which told us their ability of inhibiting process information related to themselves was in good condition. This may be one sign to distinguish the clinical patients of body image disorder and the hign risking individual.