Introduction:
Cognitive biases, such as attention bias (AB) and motivation bias (MB), have recently been suggested as important factors affecting body dissatisfaction (BD) and eating disorder symptomatology (EDS), as they can cause and maintain cognitive schema related to body image concerns.


Purpose:
Previous studies have indicated a need to study further how various patterns of AB and MB play a role in BD and EDS. Moreover, there is a significant paucity of studies regarding the effect of body-positive (BoPo) images on BD and EDS.


Methods:
In the first part, for assessing AB, three categories of images will be presented, such as the BoPo, thin-ideal and neutral images, for two different stimulus presentation times (400 ms and 1000 ms) to differentiate between the early and later stages of AB. Furthermore, in the second part of the study, for assessing MB, thin-ideal and BoPo images will be presented to determine which motivational orientation (approach or avoidance) is associated with BD and EDS. This study will employ around 180 young female adults who will participate voluntarily and complete an Attentional Response to Distal and Proximal Emotional Information (ARDPEI) task, an Approach-Avoidance task and fill out a few questionnaires.


Results (anticipated):
It is expected that there will be enhanced engagement attention bias (EAB) when stimuli are presented for 400 ms, followed by delayed disengagement attention bias (DAB) for 1000 ms of stimulus presentation time, towards thin-ideal body images. Moreover, the severity of BD and EDS will positively correlate with both EAB and DAB scores for thin-ideal body images only. For the second part of the study, the results are expected to reveal that avoidance bias towards BoPo images increases BD and EDS. Findings will be available at the time of the conference.


Conclusions (anticipated):
This study is expected to contribute to understanding the bias mechanism towards thin-ideal and BoPo images.