Message of the day: 22nd January 2015

Plasticity of Self in Eating Disorders

 

As previous posts have highlighted, body image concerns affect both men and women and are frequent amongst otherwise healthy individuals. Such concerns and related eating behaviours take more serious forms in psychiatric eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, one of the greatest challenges for modern health professionals. This is partly due to the multiple factors involved in these pathologies, including neurobiological factors, family dynamics and the surrounding post-modern culture that enforces a cult of objectifying the body.

 

Joint research undertaken by British and Australian major universities used the Rubber-Hand illusion, in which people can be induced to experience a rubber hand as their own, to investigate body awareness in anorexic patients.
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The study found that subjects diagnosed with eating disorders experienced the illusion more strongly than healthy controls. Moreover, the degree to which the subject experienced the illusion was correlated with the severity of their eating disorder pathology. The authors concluded that these patients’ body awareness may be more affected by visual information than healthy controls, and thus one could hypothesise that their body image is more susceptible to external influences. While this conclusion is negative at face value, it also suggests positive external influences may be able to help these patients reduce their body image distortions. Future research could thus explore such findings to design appropriate interventions.

 

References
Eshkevari E, Rieger E, Longo MR, et al. (2011) Increased plasticity of the bodily self in eating disorders. Psychological Medicine. (42) 4: 819-828.