What’s in a face? Social cognition differences in women with anorexia nervosa.
Statistics from the National Eating Disorder Information Centre state that 2-3% of Canadians will at some point in their lifetime meet the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder (ED), which includes anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and other disordered eating conditions. Further, those with EDs have a reduced life expectancy of 20-25 years. Importantly, this disorder is ten times more likely to affect women. Recent research suggests that women with a current or past history of an ED may have difficulties with social cognition, such as attending to and remembering social information. If it is difficult to pay attention to people, or remember them, imagine how much harder it would be to navigate every day social exchanges, interpret body language and social rules, or even build meaningful relationships. What is striking is that even those women who 'gain the weight' back, and are thus remitted from the ED, still show lingering social-cognitive deficits after so-called 'recovery'. Little is known about these disordered cognitions in those with a history of ED, and futher it is unclear whether these differences manifest differently across the type of eating disorder. To complicate matters, there is evidence that women with AN are similar to those with an autism spectrum disorder, in that they both show difficulties with social communication. In this study, we will look at different social-cognitive measures in women who have a history of an eating disorder and will investigate their level of autistic-like traits. We expect to see lower performance in social attention tasks for those women with ED that have a higher frequency of autistic-like traits. Information collected from this study can be directly utilized by healthcare professionals to tailor treatment strategies. More generally, finding these answers will not only add to the research that already exists, but can easily be applied to evidence based treatments with the ultimate goal of bettering the lives of women with ED.