1. Planning Abilities in Patients with Anorexia Nervosa Compared with Healthy Controls.
- Author
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Carral-Fernández L, González-Blanch C, Goddard E, González-Gómez J, Benito-González P, Bustamante-Cruz E, and Gómez Del Barrio A
- Subjects
- Adolescent, Adult, Anxiety psychology, Depression psychology, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Female, Healthy Volunteers, Humans, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder psychology, Reproducibility of Results, Young Adult, Anorexia Nervosa psychology, Cognition, Neuropsychological Tests
- 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 (all p-values p > .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.
- Published
- 2016
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