Date: March 5, 2008 (Wednesday)
Time: 12:30 – 14:00 (sandwich lunch from 12:30 –12:45; seminar begins at 12:45)
Venue: Seminar Room 5, LG-1/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Abstract:
Meta-analyses indicate that most eating disorder and obesity prevention programmes have not reduced risk for onset of eating disorders and obesity. This presentation will describe a series of prevention trials that have evaluated a dissonance-based intervention designed to reduce body image disturbances and risk for eating pathology. The largest of these trials compared this dissonance intervention to a healthy weight management intervention, an expressive writing control condition, and an assessment-only control condition. Dissonance participants showed significantly greater decreases in thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction, negative affect, eating disorder symptoms, and psychosocial impairment, and lower risk for eating pathology onset through 2-3 years follow-up than assessment-only and expressive writing controls. Healthy weight participants showed greater decreases in thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction, negative affect, eating disorder symptoms, and psychosocial impairment, less increases in weight, and lower risk for eating pathology and obesity onset through 2-3 years follow-up than assessment-only and expressive-writing controls. Dissonance participants showed a 60% reduction in risk for eating pathology onset and healthy weight participants showed a 61% reduction in risk for eating pathology onset and a 55% reduction in risk for obesity onset relative to assessment-only controls through 3-year follow-up, implying that the effects are clinically important and enduring.

Bio-sketch:
Dr. Stice completed his training at the University of Oregon, Arizona State University, the University of California San Diego, and Stanford University. He was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, but is currently a Senior Research Scientist at Oregon Research Institute. His programme of research focuses on identifying etiologic processes that increase risk for future development of eating disorders, obesity, and depression, as well as on developing and evaluating prevention programmes for these three disturbances. Recently he has initiated brain-imaging studies to investigate neural substrates that may increase risk for these problems. He has managed several large prospective etiologic studies and randomized prevention trials that have been funded by the National Institute of Health in the US.

Presentation file

Photo Gallery