Reducing Body Dissatisfaction by means of an Evaluative Conditioning Procedure in Undergraduate Women

Prior findings in three small-scale studies were mixed showing positive effects in pre-clinical samples, but not in a clinical sample of eating disorder patients. Therefore, our main goal was to replicate the original finding of Martijn et al. (2010) in a well-powered unselected sample of 129 female undergraduates.

We assessed the impact of EC on questionnaire measures of body satisfaction as well as on affective ratings of the participants’ body pictures used in the task to verify whether the EC procedure was effective in heightening the subjective valence of these pictures. Supporting the validity of the current EC procedure, participants in the experimental condition rated their own pictures after the training as more positive than participants in the control condition.