HABITUATION PATTERNS TO COLOR NAMING OF EATING-RELATED STIMULI IN ANOREXICS AND NONCLINICAL CONTROLS

The current study was an investigation into intra-session changes in t he pattern of Stroop colour-naming impairments with body shape-related words and food-related words. The subject pool comprised anorexic wom en and a control group of nonclinically disordered women. The results indicated that anorexic women show greater colour-naming decrements th at non-disordered controls for both types of eating-related words. Str oop interference significantly decreased across the course of the expe riment with the body-shape words for the anorexic subjects, thereby in dicating habituation to the semantic content of those words. There was no comparable process of habituation observed with the food-related w ords.