Facial Expression Recognition in People with Differing Levels of Eating Disorder Symptoms

Abstract

Previous studies of emotion categorization abilities of people with eating disorders used accuracy and reaction time to identify performance deficits for these individuals. The conclusions from this literature have been mixed, due in part to low sample sizes and inconsistent assessment of comorbid diagnoses. The current study re-examined eating disorder symptom severity as a function of emotion categorization abilities, using visual cognition paradigms that offer insights into how emotional faces may be categorized, as opposed to how well these faces are categorized. This relationship was examined while controlling for anxiety, depression, alexithymia, and emotion regulation. Visual information use, emotion representation fidelity, and categorization accuracy were unrelated to eating disorder symptom severity in a sub-clinical sample of undergraduate students. Future research may benefit from the visual cognition tasks validated in this study. More complex designs are needed to test mediational pathways through which recognition deficits may operate.