HWB Seminar, Dr Valentina Cardi

Social behaviour in people with eating disorders: the underlying role of cognitive biases towards the risk of rejection

Dr Valentina Cardi, King's College, London

Social difficulties have been identified as predisposing, triggering and maintaining factors in eating disorders. The underlying mechanisms of these difficulties remain to be clarified. The goal of my research is to examine cognitive biases (i.e. attention and interpretation bias) towards the risk of rejection in patients suffering from eating disorders. The clinical implication of my experimental studies is to develop and implement the use of online computerised trainings to improve sensitivity to social reward. Boosting patients’ responsiveness to social reward is likely to improve social functioning and in turn, to reduce the need of using eating disorder symptoms as coping mechanism to deal with interpersonal challenges.