Some Effects of Body Weight Schemas Upon Cognition
Date
1995
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether women who are schematic for body weight display certain biases in cognitive behavior. Two groups of subjects, schematics and aschematics, were asked to perform three types of tasks: lexical decision, interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, and memory. Results showed that schematics and aschematics demonstrated significantly different patterns of response in all three tasks. In the lexical decision task, schematics responded with greater accuracy to weight-related words than did aschematics. When instructed to write a story about an ambiguous TAT-type picture, schematics were more likely than aschematics to introduce some weight content. Finally, two days after watching a movie, schematics demonstrated better recognition of weight-related material from the movie than did aschematics. Results are discussed in terms of the potential for use of the cognitive tasks as instruments for assessing schematicity and risk of eating disorders.