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Electrophysiological evidence for an attentional bias in processing body stimuli in bulimia nervosa
(2015)
Empirical evidence suggests abnormalities in the processing of body stimuli in bulimia nervosa (BN). This study investigated central markers of processing body stimuli by means of event-related potentials in BN. EEG was recorded from 20 women with BN and 20 matched healthy controls while watching and evaluating underweight, normal and overweight female body pictures. Bulimics evaluated underweight bodies as less unpleasant and overweight bodies as bigger and more arousing. A higher P2 to overweight stimuli occurred in BN only. In contrast to controls, no N2 increase to underweight bodies was observed in BN. P3 was modulated by stimulus category only in healthy controls; late slow waves to underweight bodies were more pronounced in both groups. P2 amplitudes to overweight stimuli were correlated with drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction. We present novel support for altered perceptual and cognitive-affective processing of body images in BN on the subjective and electrophysiological level. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
OBJECTIVES: To elucidate the potential relationship between classification of emotional faces and impaired central processing in eating disorders and to investigate the potential mediatory role of alexithymia and depression in this relationship. METHODS: Visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) to emotional faces and classification performance were assessed in 12 anorexic females and matched healthy controls. RESULTS: Patients with anorexia nervosa showed no modulation of emotional face processing and displayed significantly increased N200 amplitudes in response to all emotional categories and decreased VEPs in response to unpleasant emotional faces in the P300 time range as compared with healthy controls. They also made more mistakes in emotional face recognition, in particular, for neutral, sad, and disgusted content. CONCLUSIONS: There are marked differences in evoked potentials and emotion recognition performances of patients with anorexia nervosa and controls in facial processing. Differences in brain dynamics might contribute to difficulties in the correct recognition of facially expressed emotions, deficits in social functioning, and in turn the maintenance of eating disorders.
The processing, representation, and perception of bodily signals (interoception) plays an important role for human behavior. Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. Similarly, activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions. This article gives an overview over present findings and models on interoception and mechanisms of embodiment and highlights its relevance for disorders that are suggested to represent a translation deficit of bodily states into subjective feelings and self-awareness.