Search

Biopsychosocial conceptualizations of eating disorders (EDs) suggest the combination of an individual's emotional vulnerability and invalidating environment increases the likelihood of developing pervasive emotion dysregulation, and subsequent use of ED behaviors to regulate emotion (Haynos & Fruzetti, 2011; Safer, Telch, & Chen, 2009). The current study aimed to provide initial support for this model in adolescent EDs, through examining the interaction between an adolescent's emotional vulnerability, indexed by attentional biases for emotions, and an invalidating family environment. Specifically, we examined the ability of this interaction to discriminate youth with EDs from a comparison group of youth with chronic pain diagnoses, who were used to control for the presence of non-specific effects of having any illness. Fifty adolescent girls (25 with EDs and 25 with chronic pain) completed an emotional dot-probe task assessing attentional biases for emotional faces, and parents completed the Emotions as a Child Scale (Magai, 1996; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007) to assess response to teen emotion. Results showed that teen angry attentional bias moderated the relationship between parental response to sadness and teen ED status: for teens with high attention bias towards angry faces, maladaptive parental response to sadness predicted increased odds of ED status versus chronic pain status., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Recent research has highlighted the potential role of attention bias for emotional stimuli as a possible cognitive risk factor for depression in youth. However, differences in youth emotion regulation or maternal affect may moderate the association between maternal and youth depression and youth attention biases. The current study investigated the relationship between maternal and youth depressive symptoms and youth (aged 11–17 years) attention bias for sad and happy faces in 59 mother–youth dyads, examining whether positive and negative maternal affect observed during structured interaction tasks or youth emotion regulation tendencies moderated associations between maternal and youth depression and attention biases. Youth suppression interacted with maternal and youth depression to predict sad attentional biases in youth, while maternal positive affect interacted with maternal depression to predict happy attention biases in youth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]