Anorexia nervosa (AN) involves extreme food restriction and body image disturbances, partly sustained by altered responses to food cues, including implicit and behavioral avoidance, especially toward high-calorie foods. We tested whether altering body ownership in virtual reality could modulate such biases. Female participants with restricting-subtype AN (AN-R; n = 29) and healthy controls (HC; n = 31) completed three sessions: a baseline and two full-body illusion (FBI) sessions in which they embodied slimmer or larger avatars than their own body size. Across sessions, they performed a binocular rivalry task and a food-specific approach-avoidance task with high- and low-calorie foods, together with body-size estimation and symptom measures. At baseline, AN-R participants showed greater perceptual salience and stronger avoidance of high-calorie foods than HC. Relative to the baseline, embodying a larger avatar attenuated avoidance in AN-R, whereas HC showed the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that the FBI can transiently modify implicit food-related avoidance in AN-R.
Dimakopoulou et al. (Fri,) studied this question.