Do disorder-relevant cognitive biases endure in recovered bulimics?

To test whether disorder-relevant cognitive biases persist following recovery from bulimia nervosa, we asked female bulimics, short-term recovered bulimics, long-term recovered bulimics, and nondieting control participants to perform attentional and memory tasks. The attentional (Stroop) task required participants to color-name food words, body words, and neutral words. The memory task required participants to read a story that comprised propositions relevant and irrelevant to eating disorder concerns, and then to recall the story verbatim. The results indicated that the bulimic group exhibited selective processing of information related to body, but not food, concerns in both tasks. Both recovered groups performed indistinguishably from the control group. These results suggest that a cognitive bias for body-related cues is confined to individuals with current bulimia and is not evident in those who have recovered.

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