Brain Study Unlocks "Why Women Are More Vulnerable To Have An Eating Disorders Than Men?"

Research study on "Illusory Obesity Triggers Body Dissatisfaction Responses in the Insula and Anterior Cingulate Cortexon" unlocks the neurobiological underpinnings why women are more vulnerable to have eating disorders than men, as the Lead Author Dr. Catherine Preston, of the Department of Psychology at York University in the United Kingdom, and colleages publish their findings in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Researchers find that in response to perceived obesity, women are more likely than men to experience brain activity relating to negative body perception. This is due to a lower dorsal anterior cingulate response to perceived obesity. It is possible that the reduced anterior cingulate activity observed in females is purely a consequence of females having higher eating-disorder psychopathology.

For this study, researchers aimed to pinpoint the brain activity that might underlie negative body perceptions.

 "In this study, we aimed to examine the neural correlates of body satisfaction in healthy controls and possible links to perceptual body representation networks using a multisensory body illusion that elicits the illusory experience of being obese. The resultant neural activity was also related to nonclinical levels of eating-disorder psychopathology to determine if the link with eating-disorder psychopathology remains without the confounds of dehydration and emaciation found with clinical patients," say the authors.

How do they find it?

An experiment was conducted using virtual reality to assess the brain's response to body appearance to 32 healthy particpants-16 men and 16 women. None of these the participants had a history of eating disorders, and their height and weight were measured upon before the actual experiment.

Participants were screened for current psychiatric conditions using the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview screen and for eating-disorder psychopathology using the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q).

The participants were required to wear virtual reality headset that when they view the first person to be shown either "slim" or obese they will see it like the body belonged to them.

During the experiment, participant's brain activity are being monitored through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Each trial lasted 30 seconds and contained 18 touches that were equally divided between the left, right, and center of the torso.

After each trial, 2 body satisfaction questions were presented. The first question assessed how the participant felt about their body at that moment in time by asking "Right now, how satisfied are you with your body?", and the second question asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with an ownership statement "The body in the image felt like it was my body". 

For this study, Researchers believed to the best of their knowledge that it is the first to directly investigate the neural correlates of feelings of body dissatisfaction in healthy controls in relation to body perception.