Cognitive aetiologies of Anorexia Nervosa

• This theory explains Anorexia in terms of distorted and irrational thought processes that surround their WEIGHT and FOOD, such as:
• All or nothing extreme thinking: e.g. 'Food with fat in is bad and must not be eaten'
• Interpreting other's behaviour as directly related to themsleves: e.g. 'Those people must be talking about me'
• Catastrophising: e.g. 'If i eat that cake, it will make me fat'
• These distorted thought proceses lead to STRICT, inflexible dietary rules
  
• Sticking to these rules decreases anxiety
• If these rules are broken, the sufferer will experience a sense of failure and a decrease in self-esteem
• Anorexics tend to have negative self-schemas: inaccurate body perceptions and only pay attention to information that supporrts this view

• Used a computer program to assess an anorexic's self image
• 3D scanner gives a real, accurate and likelike patient image 
• Patients are then able to adjust images to meet their self-percieved body image 
• 70% chose an image with a stimulated visual weight gain  of about 20%
• NONE of them could pick out their real body image

• Asked Ps to assess their own body image/shape/ size
• Their self-assessments were then compared to assessments given by 10 independent raters 
• Anorexic women: overestimated body size
• Healthy contol women: understimated  body size

• Sufferers also develop this.
• Where attention  is directed towards information relating to food andbody size
• A stroop study involved participants being shown lists of words in different colours and they have to say what colour the word is 
• Participants with Anorexia take longer to do this with words relating to food and weight  than for neutral words
• This is because our brain work on the meaning of a word, before the colour

• Anorexics are found to have higher scores on perfectionsim tests than control groups
• As perfectionism levels increase, so does the severity of the Anorexia symptoms
• Tends to run in families which would usually indicate genetics...
• Maybe it is the increase in risk of developing a personality type that is a risk factor
• Researchers investigated cases of Anorexic boys and girls and found high levels of perfectionism in their past (73% for girls, 50% for boys)

:) Perfectionism is pre-dated: so it is not a symptom of the disorder 

:( Retrospective, subjective qualitative data: issues of accuracy and reliability 

• Theories of cognitive distortions, negative self-schemas and cognitive bias help our understanding of how an eating disorder affects cognitive functions not the causes
• There is evidence of a perfectionist personality causing Anoreixa but more research would need to be carried out 
• It may be that a perferctionist personality leads to the three effects listed above when present among other causes, such as a genetic predisposition, a damaged lateral hypothalamus or through media influence