Habituation patterns to colour naming of eating-related stimuli in anorexics and non-clinical controls

The current study was an investigation into intra-session changes in the pattern of Stroop colour-naming impairments with body shape-related words and food-related words. The subject pool comprised anorexic women and a control group of non-clinically disordered women. The results indicated that anorexic women show greater colour-naming decrements that non-disordered controls for both types of eating-related words. Stroop interference significantly decreased across the course of the experiment with the body-shape words for the anorexic subjects, thereby indicating habituation to the semantic content of those words. There was no comparable process of habituation observed with the food-related words.