Guardia et al (2012)

Question 1

AIM

Answer 1

• To investigate whether problems in judging body actions, such as deciding whther a body fits
  through a space, occurred only when judging one’s own body or whether it was an overall
  judgement problems.
• Would people with AN be different from a control group in judging whether a gap was large
  enough for their body to pass through.
• To continue previous research which showed that patients with AN misjudged their ability to
  fit through a door that was clearly too big for them, by also testing whether this problem extended to other individual - would they also misjudge the body size of other people.

Question 2

METHOD/PROCEDURE

Answer 2

• Ethics: The study was approved by an independent ethics committee. - Each participant was given an
  information sheet so that they could give informed consent.
• Parental consent was given for anyone
  under 18.
• Participants: 50 young female participants took part, 25 with AN from an eating disorder clinic and 25
  healthy controls.
• They were all students from Lille, France and were matched for age and education.
• They checked that there were no perpetual problems and that the AN patients fulfilled the DSM-IV-
  R criteria for diagnosis. A psychiatrist carried out an interview to check there were no co-morbilities.
  Controls had a BMI of between 18.5 and 25.
• Assessments of height, shoulder width and weight were standardised. They measured changes over time in nutritional status by looking at weight before the disorder, six months before the study and at the time of the study. They gathered data about body dissatisfaction and concern about weight using questionnaires, including the Body Shape Questionnaire and the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (which showed the drive for thinness and the body dissatisfaction score).

Question 3

Experimental Procedure

Answer 3

• The experimental procedure: 51 different openings from 30cm - 80cm were projected onto a wall in
  random order. Each opening was presented 4 times. The opening reached the floor so that it looked
  like a door.
• There were two conditions.
• 1. The first person perspective (1PP): Participants judged whether their own body would fit
     through the opening. They had to imagine themselves walking through and say whether
     they could walk through at normal speed without turning sideways.
• 2. The third person perspective (3Pp): Participants had to imagine the experimenter going
     through the opening. They could move to get a better view of the experimenter and had to
     say whether the experimenter could walk through without turning.
     The experimenter was 28 years old, 1.60m in height, weighed 52kg and her shoulder width was 38cm.
• She stood 5.9m from the wall projection.
• An opening was classed as a perceived critical opening (a space that you could walk through) when it
  had a ‘yes’ response 50% of the time. A ratio was obtained by dividing the perceived critical opening (size) by the shoulder width of the participant. When the perceived critical opening was 1 it meant that it was equal to the shoulder width so no chance of passing through.

Question 4

RESULTS

Answer 4

• The AN group had a significantly higher score on the Body Shape Questionnaire.
• The AN group showed significant overestimation of their own body size, judging that they would be
  unable to fit through an opening that was considerably bigger than their actual body size.
• They were much more accurate in predicting the body size of the experimenter. In the 3PP condition
  the mean perceptual ratios were the same.
• There was a significant difference between the mean ratios for those with AN in the 1PP and 3pp
  condition.

Question 5

CONCLUSIONS

Answer 5

• Those with AN significantly overestimated their own ‘possibility’ in relation to the control group.
• The patients also said they felt larger than they were.
• Another important result was that, although those with AN made errors when judging their own possibility, they did not make such errors when judging the possibility of the experimenter.
• The control group’s judgement were the same when judging their own or the experimenter possibility.