Socio-cognitive processing in people with eating disorders: computerized tests of mentalizing, empathy and imitation skills.

Objective. Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses characterized by extreme eating behaviors, such as sustained food restriction or loss of control over eating. Symptoms are thought to be maintained by a variety of mechanisms, one of which may be the socio-cognitive impairments associated with eating disorders. While some previous work has addressed socio-cognitive impairments in eating disorders, this work has relied mostly on self-report data. Methods. Here we employed computerized tests of (a) mentalizing (ability to infer the mental states of others); (b) empathy (the degree to which the emotional states of others can be identified and the degree to which the states of others impact one's own emotional state); and (c) imitation (the degree to which observation of another's actions prompts the performance of those actions); in a group of 78 women with an eating disorder and a matched control group of 66 healthy women. Results. People with eating disorders...