Examining the relationship eating disorder symptomology and the processing of body image words in females

Abstract: Research has demonstrated that individuals with an eating disorder selectively attend to stimuli related to their concerns. However, there has been relatively little consistent evidence with at-risk non-clinical samples. One possible reason is the measure used to determine the at-risk non-clinical sample. The current study investigated the use of the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) as a predictive measure of our at-risk non-clinical sample using their performance on a visual lexical decision task. Our results demonstrate that there is a significant negative relationship between scores on the EDI and response times to body related words, supporting the use of the EDI as a predictive measure when determining our at-risk non-clinical samples for cognitive investigations.