From Bad to Worse: Safety Behaviors Exacerbate Eating Disorder Fears.

ABSTRACT: When evaluating ambiguous situations, humans sometimes use their behavior as a source of information (behavior-as-information effect) and interpret safety behaviors as evidence for danger. Accordingly, we hypothesized that eating disorder safety behaviors (restrictive eating, body checking, etc.) might aggravate fear and anxiety in individuals with an eating disorder. The present study tested to what extent eating disorder safety behaviors increase threat perception in individuals with and without an eating disorder. For this, 108 individuals with a self-reported eating disorder diagnosis and 82 healthy controls rated the dangerousness of several short situations. The situations systematically varied in the presence of eating disorder safety behaviors and danger information. As expected, a

SUBMITTER: Spix M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10376478 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature