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Childhood Teasing and Adult Implicit Cognitive Biases

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Abstract

There is growing evidence for the role of negative implicit cognitions in eating disorders as well as other forms of psychopathology. What is less well understood are the potential developmental correlates of these biases and whether there is any preferential relation between the type of childhood experiences and implicit cognitions for one disorder versus another. This study examined the relations of implicit eating-relevant and depression-relevant cognitions with adult women’s reports of childhood teasing. As hypothesized, reports of childhood teasing were significantly related to both eating-relevant and depressive implicit associations. Supporting the preferential relations hypothesis, reports of a specific type of teasing—weight-related teasing—were significantly more strongly related to eating-relevant implicit associations than depression-relevant implicit associations. These findings were maintained even after statistically controlling for current symptom levels. Given the high comorbidity of eating disorders and depression, these findings represent an important step in better discerning the characteristics of negative childhood events hypothesized to be uniquely associated with disorder-specific cognitions.

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Notes

  1. To facilitate comparisons with other studies, the means, standard deviations, and ranges presented are from the untransformed variables.

  2. Although we also conducted analyses controlling for both interviewer-assessed and self-reported symptoms of eating disorders and depression in the same analysis, these analyses yielded a suppressor effect due to the strong correlations between the self-report and interviewer-administered measures of each construct (the valence of the relation switches from positive to negative once other variables are included in the model). Therefore, we focus on the results of analyses with interviewer-assessed and self-reported symptoms included as covariates in separate analyses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Binghamton University, P.O. Box 6000, Binghamton, NY, 13902, USA

    Jessica S. Benas & Brandon E. Gibb

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  1. Jessica S. Benas
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  2. Brandon E. Gibb
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Correspondence to Jessica S. Benas.

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Benas, J.S., Gibb, B.E. Childhood Teasing and Adult Implicit Cognitive Biases. Cogn Ther Res 35, 491–496 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-010-9326-y

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