Night eating syndrome (NES) is characterized by excessive evening and/or nocturnal eating episodes. Studies indicate an attentional bias towards food in other eating disorders. For NES, however, evidence of attentional food processing is lacking. Attention towards food and non-food stimuli was compared using eye-tracking in 19 participants with NES and 19 matched controls without eating disorders during a free exploration paradigm and a visual search task. In the free exploration paradigm, groups did not differ in initial fixation position or gaze duration. However, a significant orienting bias to food compared to non-food was found within the NES group, but not in controls. A significant attentional maintenance bias to non-food compared to food was found in both groups. Detection times did not differ between groups in the search task. Only in NES, attention to and faster detection of non-food stimuli were related to higher BMI and more evening eating episodes. The results might indicate an attentional approach-avoidance pattern towards food in NES. However, further studies should clarify the implications of attentional mechanisms for the etiology and maintenance of NES.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:34465 |
| Date | 10 July 2019 |
| Creators | Baldofski, Sabrina, Lüthold, Patrick, Sperling, Ingmar, Hilbert, Anja |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 10.1016/j.beth.2017.07.005, 0005-7894 |
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