Auditory Attentional Bias To Body-related Information In The Women With Fat Negative Physical Self Schema

For half a century, there has been fruitful studies in the area of physical self, most of which were on the risk of factors for body image disturbance and eating disorder. Negative physical self (NPS), or body image disturbance, is defined as the negative perception, negative emotional experience and corresponding behavior conditioning about body. In china, negative physical self contains specific physical appearance concerns related to Fatness, thinness, facial appearance, and shortness, as well as a General Appearance Concern dimension. Based on the concept of negative physical self, fat negative physical self is defined as negative perception, negative emotional experience and corresponding behavior conditioning due to their beliefs that they are fat. A large number of studies on participants with negative physical self have found that this group of people showed attentional bias to body-, shape- and food-related information. It was argue that the disordered and negative physical self schema, could serve to ease and speed process schema-related information, so that they selectively attend, interpret, and later recall these information in a biased manner at different stage of information processing.However, these researches were nearly conducted within the visual domain. Whether attentional bias toward body-related information could extend to the auditory realm in women with fat negative physical self schema? And whether attentional bias can be clarified by assessing body-related information having both positive and negative valences? Questions mentioned above would be addressed in this study. Accordingly, from a social cognitive view, a dichotic listening paradigm was used to explore attentional bias toward schema-congruent and schema-incongruent body-related information in the auditory domain among women with negative physical self schema. This study provided with important theoretical and practical value. Firstly, this study explored the characteristics of cognitive processing among women with negative physical self schema from a novel perspective, which would serve to enrich and perfect self schema theory. Secondly, this study could provide methods for therapy of individuals with body image disturbance or eating disorders, which could have important practical value.The present study included study 1 and study 2. In study 1, participants were asked to detect target words (schema-congruent vs. schema-incongruent) inserted randomly in the passages in either channel. Three types of target words, which are negative body words, positive body words, and neutral words, were presented in blocks. The detection of target words as an index of attentional bias toward the target word. In study 2, participants are asked to shadow passage presented to one ear and ignore the distracter words presented to the other ear. Meanwhile, they were asked to respond to the presence of the visual probe as soon as possible. Similar to the study 1, distracter words included negative body words, positive body words, and neutral words, which are presented in blocks. Both shadowing errors and RTs are indices of the influence of distracters words.The conclusions were drawn from the present study:(1) women with negative physical self schema selectively attend to schema-congruent negative body information within the auditory realm. Compare to control group, women with fat negative physical self schema detected the target word FAT more often on the attended channel. Women with fat negative physical self schema made more shadowing errors than did the control group, when passages were paired with fat words. (2) The study 1 didn't demonstrate the existence of attentional bias toward schema-incongruent positive body information, while the study 2 did it. However, women with negative physical self schema selectively attend to schema-incongruent positive body information, but not selectively resist.