Body Perception and Emotion within Clinical Eating Disorders and Non-Clinical Eating Disorder Psychopathology

Discontent towards one’s own body has become increasingly prevalent within Western culture, with greater body dissatisfaction implicated with higher risk of disordered eating. Specifically, aberrant eating attitudes and behaviours are associated with disturbances in one’s body image, which comprises the conscious representation of the body based on its perceptual, cognitive and affective evaluations. The present thesis investigates the role of sensory signals within body perception and its relationship with bodily emotions in the context of body image. This is investigated within clinical eating disorder populations, and in relation to eating disorder psychopathology within the non-clinical population. Chapter 2 investigates the role of perceptual and cognitive-affective components of body image within eating disorder groups, revealing an increased malleability of body perception accompanied by lower explicit and implicit body satisfaction compared with healthy controls. Chapter 3 explores how bodies are represented neurally in the Extrastriate Body Area amongst healthy females, in which patterns of response within this region were modulated by the interactive effect of visual perspective and body morphology. Chapter 4 further highlights the importance of visual perspective within body representation, showing that subjective embodiment towards a whole mannequin body can be induced from mere visual capture of congruent visuoproprioceptive signals when viewed from a first-person visual perspective. Chapter 5 explores the role of affective touch towards whole body ownership, with no enhancing effect of embodiment shown due to the interoceptive properties of affective touch. Finally, Chapter 6 assesses the psychometric properties of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire in the non-clinical population, to suggest that this measure may require reassessment in accordance with updated symptomology. Together, the present thesis uses diverse experimental methods to explore the perceptual and cognitive-affective components of body image, providing new insights into the way in which such components are investigated which can be used to inform future work within this research topic.