Visual body size estimation in adolescent anorexia nervosa: Behavioural and neurophysiological data suggest intact visual perception and biased emotional attention.

ABSTRACT: Body image disturbance is a key symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN). AN patients report body dissatisfaction and overestimate their own body size in several tasks. This study aimed to clarify whether this overestimation arises from deficits in visual perception. To this end, 36 adolescent restrictive-type AN patients and 42 matched healthy controls performed metric and depictive body size estimation (BSE) tasks. Magneto- and electroencephalography were measured during the size estimation of 66 computer-generated body pictures varying in size from underweight to overweight. AN patients versus controls showed overestimation across self-referential metric and depictive BSE tasks, but similar performance in a depictive BSE task without self-reference and similar early neurophysiological responses

SUBMITTER: Romero Frausto H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11489811 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature