Neurocognitive reserve Cognition in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) has been shown to improve after treatment. It has been found that age, education, depression, body mass index (BMI), duration of illness, and length of hospitalization were not related to cognitive functioning during hospitalization and neuropsychological improvement. One of the predictors of cognitive impairment in individuals with AN is their cognitive reserve, where the greater cognitive reserve leads to more resiliency to cognitive impairment. The level of cognitive reserve predicts improvement in neuropsychological function including verbal<unk> , semantic fluency, basic auditory attention, and visuospatial construction. In addition, the level of cognitive reserve has been found to be associated with different AN prognosis and therefore treatment may be altered based on the cognitive reserve, where individuals who may experience more severe neurospsychological deficits may need more rehearsal and repeated practice of skills during treatment. COMET Low self-esteem is considered to be an important aspect of various<unk><unk>  (ED). Implicit and opinions that refer to oneself are the main issues of low self-esteem, and competitive<unk>  training (COMET) was developed as a treatment method for individuals with ED in order to target these opinions. COMET is aimed at making the knowledge that patients already know more easily retrieved from long-term<unk>  by strengthening the retrieval of functional representations that are in competition with dysfunctional representations. COMET emphasizes positive<unk> es by using imagery, posture and facial expressions, self-verbalizations, and music. COMET stimulates emotional saliency of functional self-concepts by writing stories about scenes where positive characteristics are in action and repeatedly verbalized positive self-statements are connected to the scenes. Other techniques of COMET used to promote emotional salience include the deliberate movements of posture, facial expressions and imagery. Music that is selected by patients with ED is used to stimulate positive mood. COMET promotes higher and competitive retrieval by activating emotionally enhanced positive self-knowledge repeatedly, and then this knowledge is associated with situations and cues that trigger these dysfunctional negative self-concepts. Overall, studies have confirmed that COMET, in addition to regular therapy, enhances self-esteem in individuals with<unk><unk>  and low self-esteem. Virtual reality A reference frame is a way someone can represent their location in space, and evidence has shown that our spatial experience involves the combination of our sensory inputs from two specific reference frames including egocentric and allocentric. The ability to represent and recall objects, including our own body, changes according to our frame of references, where an egocentric stance represents objects relative to ourselves while an allocentric stance represents objects independent of ourselves. These reference frames influence how<unk> es are stored and retrieved where in the egocentric frame, an individual sees an event from their own perspective while in the allocentric frame, an individual sees themselves engaged in the event as an observer would. In Western culture, the body is considered a personal symbol where slenderness is associated with happiness, success and social acceptability and being overweight is associated with laziness, lack of willpower and being out of control. Social influence may therefore explain the progression from the “locked” allocentric negative body image, to obesity or<unk><unk>  (ED) because the media and culture both promote diet and controlled<unk>  as methods to improve body-image satisfaction. Individuals with ED are not able to use their sensory inputs to update allocentric representations of the body, therefore they hate their body even after significant weight loss and continue to attempt to improve it. Virtual reality (VR) has been aimed at fixing this issue by helping to change the experience of the body and to improve body image in patients suffering from ED or obesity. In VR sessions, patients enter a virtual environment that causes them to face critical situations and are then helped to develop specific strategies to cope and avoid these situations. Side effects of VR include nausea and dizziness. Overall, good results were found during treatment with experiential cognitive therapy that also included specific body-image protocol based on VR in obese and binge-eating patients.
Eating disorders and memory
Sexual motivation and hormones
Epilepsy and driving
Somatic experiencing
Nutrition and cognition
Sleep and metabolism
Digital media use and mental health
Nutrition psychology