Emotional Functioning in Eating Disorders:

Emotional Functioning in Eating Disorders: Attentional Bias, Emotion Recognition and Emotion Regulation

The researchers in the article entitled "Emotional functioning in eating disorders: attentional bias, emotion recognition and emotion regulation" were looking to confirm the relationship between a number of interpersonal processes such as emotion regulation, emotion recognition and attentional biases and eating disorders. The researchers hypothesized that there was a significant relationship between such processes and people with eating disorders, but due to the lack of empirical evidence exploring this correlation, they attempted to test it. The study conducted by the researchers was fairly complex, and was based upon gathering a population set of women with eating disorders (both bulimia and varying forms of anorexia, and running a series of tests on them and comparing those results to a control group. The former population came from an eating disorder research unit in South London, whereas the latter were recruited from college students in the same city. Essentially, the study itself determined the differences in the two populations responses to the Pictorial Stoop task and the Reading the Mind in the Eye task, both of which revealed a social attentional bias and an angry threat attentional bias in those with eating disorders. Also, a test known as the DERS indicated that there was a significant difference in these two populations in their ability to regulate their emotions, with the women with eating disorders demonstrating less ability to do so than that of their counterparts. Lastly, it is significant to note that participants underwent clinical testing to ensure that there were parallels between the groups "regarding age, IQ score estimated using the NART, or years of education" (Harrison et al.,2010, p. 1890).

A neutral observer of this study and its findings would conceivably have a fair amount of confidence in both of these aspects, primarily because of the similarities in the groups and their participants, which were similar in education, age and intelligence. Additionally, the methodology employed by this study was certainly non-partisan and balanced. Still, there were a few limitations that could very well affect the efficaciousness of this study and its overall implications. Specifically the participants that comprised those with anorexia actually had two different types of anorexia, which could have "resulted in a loss of power and replications"(Harrison et al., 2010, 1894) -- particularly since this study was relatively small (with only 50 women involved with anorexia). Also, the fact that women in the study all chose to participate in it could very well have produced a form of sampling bias that could have affected the results.