The Attention Bias Of Collage Female Students With Fat Negative Physical Self: Attention Shift Or Maintenance

Fat Negative Physical Self (FNPS) is defined as negative cognition, emotion and behavior to his/her own body that the individuals think they are fat. There are some researches on the attention bias to the fat-related information of FNPS individuals. However, most of the researchers thought that the component of the attention bias of FNPS is attention vigilance, which means that fat-related information attract the attention of FNPS individuals. The present study doubt about the explanation of the result and the methodology of previous studies directly. According to the component of attention, we point out another probability of the attention bias of FNPS individuals that the component of the attention bias might be attention maintenance, which means that the attention FNPS individuals might be, once detected, difficult to disengage from fat related information. Three experiments were manipulated to test the hypothesis. Participants were distributed experiment group and control group by Negative Physical Self Scale-Fat (NPSS-F, CHEN, Jackson, HUANG, 2006). Experiment la used the cuing paradigm and the SOA was set to 300ms, in order to study the vigilance and the disengagement component of attention bias. Experiment used the same paradigm as experiment la, with one change that the cue material was changed to body figure pictures and vase silhouette. The results of experiment la and 1b were consistent with the hypothesis. However, response preparation and the probably mask effect were not excluded, which might affect the result. Therefore, we modified the paradigm in experiment 2, the task of the participants in experiment 2 was to identify the letter that might be located around the picture presented on the center of the screen. The result suggested that the attention tended to dwell on the fat body figure longer than that of the thin body figure. However, another unexpected result found that the dwell time of the normal body figure was also longer than that of the thin body figure. To analyze the unexpected result, we compared the BMI of experiment group with the overweight standard, and found that the BMI of most of the experiment group participants were under the standard. It means that the body shape of most of the experiment group participants were in normal range. And because what NPSS-F measured was that the degree of participants negative cognition, emotion and behavior to their present normal body. Therefore, we considered that the normal body figure was somewhat negative to participants in experiment group. Because of that, we used the fat and thin body figures in experiment 3 only. In experiment 3, inhibition of return paradigm was used. Our logic is that, if the dwell time on the fat body figure of the experiment group was longer than that of the control group and of the thin body figure. The magnitude of inhibition of return should reduce. And we did find the result.In conclusion, we found that the attention of the FNPS female collage students tended dwell on the fat-related information, rather than attracted more quickly.