The effect of fasting on attentional biases for food and body shape/weight words in high and low Eating Disorder Inventory scorers

OBJECTIVE: To assess attentional biases associated with food and body shape/weight words in fasted and nonfasted high and low Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2) scorers. METHOD: Subjects were 56 female first-year undergraduate psychology students, aged 17-24 years, participating for course credit. High and low scorers on the Drive for Thinness and Body Dissatisfaction subscales of the EDI-2 completed alternative modified dot probe tasks containing food words, body shape/weight words, and control words, under fasted and nonfasted conditions. RESULTS: Fasting increased attentional bias toward high-calorie food words across all subjects. High EDI-2 scorers also showed an attentional bias toward low-calorie words, but only when nonfasted. DISCUSSION: Food-related attentional biases, commonly observed in eating disorder patients, may reflect a pervasive concern with food-related stimuli as opposed to being simply a product of chronic hunger. That is, with increasing hunger, high EDI-2 scorers shift their focus away from low-calorie foods to high-calorie foods. This result suggests an attentional bias basis for the cycle of high-calorie binging when hungry and low-calorie food selections when less hungry.