contemporary study: guardia et al (2012)

• aim

  to investigate whether patients with AN find it difficult to gauge their own body size and if those difficulties extend to their perceptions of others
• participants

  25 female patients from a clinic for ED's in lille, france who met the DSM IV criteria for AN and 25 healthy female controls who were all students - each groups matched on age (mean of 24yrs) and level of education (13yrs)
• procedure- stage 1

  1. each participant completed 2 questionnaires:

  • body shape questionnaire (BSQ) - measures body dissatisfaction
  • eating disorder inventory-2 (EDI-2) - measures weight and shape concerns such as 'drive for thinness'
• stage 2

  • door frame shape was projected onto a wall giving the illusion that the participants could walk through
  • 51 different width shapes projected from 30-80cm wide
• stage 3

  • projections presented in random order and each one was presented 4 times to each participant
  • tested alone & were asked to predict if they could walk through the door frame at normal speed without turning to the side (1st person perspective)
• stage 4

  • participants were then asked if another female researcher who had a similar BMI and shoulder width to the control group could fit through the door frame (3rd person perspective)
• results - patients with AN

  scored significantly higher on the EDI-2 and BSQ score and showed overestimation of body size in themselves judging that they would be unable to fit through door frames that were bigger than their actual body size
• results - AN judgements of researcher

  not the same - patients with AN were much more accurate in predicting the body size of the other person passing through the door frame
• results - control

  control group has no significant difference in their ability to accurately predict the passing of themselves or the other person
• conclusion

  the correlation between losing weight and passability perceptions suggests that when anorexics lose weight, their CNS cannot update the body image schema quickly enough to provide an accurate representation of current body size - therefore why anorexics see themselves as bigger than they actually are as the brain does not perceive their current size accurately
• strength

  • high internal validity
  • matched participants on age and education level factors that affect perception level - so ensures the only difference is that 1 group has AN patients and other did not
  • differences between passability ratio only due to presence of AN in 1 group affecting how they perceive their bodies
• weakness

  • counters high internal validity - other factors not taken into account
  • ppts young women from a clinic in lille = while most ED's are women, men can have AN and are not represented in this research, other age groups and cultures exhibitions of symptoms are not represented
  • perceptions displayed in this study are not applicable to all patients
• strength

  • replicated study
  • schneider (2009) found ppts with ED's overestimated their body parts by 30%
  • findings that AN patients overestimate their body size is reliable
• weakness

  • low mundane realism
  • making visual judgements of a persons ability to pass through a projected door from is different to walking through the door - better method would be to see ppts approach the opening to see if they walk as if they fit through or if they turn
  • method does not demonstrate the body image patients have in their minds so findings don't accurately represent mental image of AN patients