Evaluating implicit attractiveness beliefs in body dysmorphic disorder using the Go/No-go Association Task

Abstract

Cognitive-behavioral models of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) suggest the disorder is characterized by exaggerated beliefs about the significance of appearance. However, previous studies assessing automatic associations regarding the importance of attractiveness failed to find any differences between individuals with BDD and healthy control participants using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). An open question is whether the BDD and control groups indeed implicitly evaluate attractiveness comparably, or whether methodological factors (e.g., the IAT design requirement of a relative comparison category for attractiveness) made it difficult to observe group differences. To address this question, we evaluated explicit and implicit attractiveness beliefs among individuals with BDD (n = 36), individuals with a dermatological condition (n = 36), and psychiatrically healthy control participants (n = 36) using the single target category Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek, & Banaji, 2001). Indeed, BDD participants had significantly stronger implicit associations between attractive and important, relative to the other groups, whereas there was no difference between the dermatology and control groups. Further, the GNAT was effective at classifying individuals with BDD above and beyond the prediction offered by an explicit measure of attractiveness beliefs. The GNAT may be a useful tool for assessing implicit associations in clinical populations because it does not require an explicit comparison target category, which is a restriction of many implicit measures.