1. Planning Abilities in Patients with Anorexia Nervosa Compared with Healthy Controls.
- Author
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Carral-Fernández, Laura, González-Blanch, César, Goddard, Elizabeth, González-Gómez, Jana, Benito-González, Pilar, Bustamante-Cruz, Encarnación, and Gómez del Barrio, Andrés
- Subjects
ANOREXIA nervosa ,COGNITION ,PSYCHOLOGY of women ,ANOREXIA nervosa treatment ,NEUROPSYCHOLOGY research ,PATIENTS - Abstract
Objective: Altered cognitive functioning could have an important role in the development and maintenance of Anorexia Nervosa (AN). The majority of previous research has focused on flexibility and global-detail processing. The aim of this study was to explore planning abilities in women with AN.Method: Women with AN (n = 32) were compared to healthy controls (n = 42) using two different types of neuropsychological tasks for the assessment of planning abilities: Tower of London (ToL), a classic measure of planning abilities, and Zoo Map test, a more ecologically valid planning measure. Measures of AN psychopathology, anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsivity were also collected.Results: The AN group did not differ from controls in the ToL (allp-valuesp > .05), although they performed significantly worse than controls in the main score of the Zoo Map (p = .02). A worse performance in the Zoo Map test More was associated with more eating disorders (rho = −.44,p = .018) and depressive (rho = −.42,p = .026) symptoms in the AN group.Conclusions: Our study suggests the presence of subtle planning difficulties in women with AN which might be better detected using tasks with increased ecological validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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