Is visual information use during facial emotion recognition related to eating disorder symptoms in college-aged men and women? An experimental study.

Background: Previous studies of emotion recognition abilities of people with eating disorders used accuracy to identify performance deficits for these individuals. The current study examined eating disorder symptom severity as a function of emotion categorization abilities, using a visual cognition paradigm that offers insights into how emotional faces may be categorized, as opposed to just how well these faces are categorized.

Methods: Undergraduate students (N = 87, 50 women, 34 men, 3 non-binary) completed the Bubbles task and a standard emotion categorization task, as well as a set of questionnaires assessing their eating disorder symptomology and comorbid disorders. We examined the relationship between visual information use (assessed via Bubbles) and eating disorder symptomology (EDDS) while controlling for anxiety (STAI), depression (BDI-II), alexithymia (TAS), and emotion regulation difficulties (DERS-sf).

Results: Overall visual information use (i.e. how well participants used facial features important for accurate emotion categorization) was not significantly related to eating disorder symptoms, despite producing interpretable patterns for each emotion category. Emotion categorization accuracy was also not related to eating disorder symptoms.

Conclusions: Results from this study must be interpreted with caution, given the non-clinical sample. Future research may benefit from comparing visual information use in patients with an eating disorder and healthy controls, as well as employing designs focused on specific emotion categories, such as anger.