Eating Disorders
Psychologists have thought for decades that depressed people tend to distort the facts and view their lives more negatively than do nondepressed people. Yet, psychological studies have consistently revealed a peculiar exception to that pattern: Depressed people, studies indicated, judge their control of events more accurately than do nondepressed people in a
phenomenon that came to be known as “depressive realism.” Now two new studies published in February’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 134, No. 1) are starting to clear up the mystery. By refining an aspect of an experimental task that involved control over a light bulb, researchers uncovered a new twist–that nondepressed people may overestimate their control because they take more aspects of a situation into account in judging their control. The findings may help clinicians to refine therapies for depression. Br J Clin Psychol. 2006 Mar;45(Pt 1):123-35. Related Articles, Links I see what you see: The lack of a self-serving body-image bias in eating disorders. Jansen A, Smeets T, Martijn C, Nederkoorn C. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands. Objectives. Eating-disordered subjects feel unattractive, and the current idea is that this feeling reflects a distorted body image. A distorted body image requires a mismatch between the negative self-judgments and more objective judgments of the body. Design and methods. To examine whether eating-disordered subjects have valid reasons for their feelings of unattractiveness, the body images of eating-symptomatic subjects and control models were compared with inter-subjective evaluations of these bodies given by two community samples (panels; N=72, N=88). Results. Although the objective body sizes of the eating-symptomatic subjects were in the normal range and not different from control bodies, the first panel rated the (headless) bodies of the eating-symptomatic subjects as less attractive. This finding was replicated with the second panel. There was also large agreement between the eating-symptomatic subjects and the second panel on the specific body parts that were indicated as unattractive. Contrary to the eating-symptomatic subjects, the control models showed a strong positively biased perception of their own attractiveness: they rated their own bodies more positively than others rated them. Conclusion. Consensual validation of the harsh body appraisals of eating-symptomatic subjects was found. Interestingly, the normal controls were the ones that showed a biased body image; they rated themselves far more attractive than other people rated them. These data suggest that the real problem in eating disorders is not a distorted body image but a lack of a distorted body image, that is, the lack of a self-serving body-image bias. | | |