Attentional Bias Toward Food Cues Among Restrained Eaters:Evidence From A Dichotic Listening Paradigm

Restrained eaters (RE) are characterised by chronic weight and shape concerns that lead to restricted food and calorie intake (Ruderman,1986). Dietary restraint has numerous consequences including losses of self-esteem, increases in anxious and depressive symptomatology, and heightened risk for later eating disturbances (Appleton & McGowan,2006). Compared to unrestrained eaters (uRE), RE also show impaired cognitive performance, particularly on tasks involving concentration (Williams, Healy, Eade, Windle, Cowen & Green,2002) and speeded responding (Green, Rogers,& Elliman,2000).Cognitive-behavioral theorists posit that activation of self-schemata about weight, shape, and eating behavior results in information processing biases that increase risk for and perpetuate disordered eating (Vitousek & Hollon,1990; Williamson, White, York-Crowe & Stewart,2004). Based on Vitousek and Hollon (1990), research on attentional biases reflects underlying disturbances in self-schemata. Numerous studies on RE have assessed differential attention towards food-related stimuli in comparison to neutral stimuli (Faunce,2002). Consistent with the contention that eating disordered patients are preoccupied with food, RE may be more attentive to food than uRE individuals.Researchers using the emotional Stroop paradigm have reported RE take longer to name colours of eating and body-related words compared to other word types (Francis, Stewart & Hounsell,1997; Tapper, Pothos, Javad & Fadardi,2008; Green & Rogers,1993; Long, Hinton & Gillespie,1994). Hollitt, Kemps, Tiggemann, Smeets & Mills (2010) found that RE detect food words faster than neutral words within an odd-one-out paradigm. Still other researchers using a dot-probe paradigm found RE were slower in recognizing hedonic food words than words unrelated to food (Papies, Stroebe & Aarts,2008). Together, these studies suggest RE show attention biases towards food and body-related words. Information processing biases related to restrained eating have been widely documented within the visual domain, but few studies have examined associated biases in auditory information processing, particularly in non-Western cultural contexts, and most studies suggested RE showed attention bias towards food and body-related words, but there has been a paucity of research devoted to assessing biases in the processing of auditory information. Based on tenets of cognitive-behavioral perspectives that people with eating and body image concerns have a more limited capacity to direct attention towards other events due to their preoccupations with food and eating,, it was expected that RE would attend more to food distractors than neutral distractors compared to controls, To address this issue, auditory attention was investigated within a dichotic listening paradigm among Chinese undergraduate women, In study 1, participants were screened into higher and lower restrained eating groups. Participants were required to shadow (repeat aloud) a neutral passage in the attended ear and respond to visual probes, while ignoring distractors (food or neutral words) in the unattended ear. Results indicated restrained eaters made longer probe reaction time in the presence of food distractor words than did unrestrained eaters, although groups did not differ in error rates corresponding to food words presentations. In study 1a, To analyse the results in study 1, Restrained eaters were also comparatively more accurate in their capacity to distinguish previously presented food words from novel food words in a subsequent word recognition task while no group differences were observed for accuracy in recognizing neutral words. To examine the results in study 1b, we designed the study 2 and used another dichotic listening Paradigm, Findings indicate that selective information processing biases related to food stimuli extend to the auditory realm among young Chinese women with high levels of restrained eating.Findings indicate selective attentional bias related to food stimuli extend to the auditory realm among restrained eaters.There are mainly three innovations in this research:First, We used Dichotic Listening Paradigm experimental paradigm to testify the attentional bias in RS and get more directive evidences. The second, we analysed the reason why there are inaccordance results of the past studies on attentional bias in RS, It broadened the study about restrained eaters. It’s significant to the clinical intervention of eating disorders. The last, using of the more effective experimental material, we used two dichotic listening paradigms to study in this research.