Cognitive Processing of Weight and Emotional Information in Disordered Eating

Numerous theories propose a role for cognitive processing in disordered eating, but clinical scientists have yet to capitalize fully on the wealth of approaches developed by quantitative cognitive scientists when evaluating such theories. This article describes research that uses well-established and theoretically rich cognitive science approaches to demonstrate that women who struggle with disordered eating, relative to their peers, exhibit differential processing of other women’s emotional and weight information presented in photo stimuli. More generally, this work illustrates the portability of cognitive science approaches to the study of clinically relevant individual differences in complex, socially relevant processing.