background Patients with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) suffer from increased selffocused attention (SFA). This is characterised by excessively focusing towards the own body (e.g. by mirror gazing) instead of focusing towards external information. By acting thus, they presumably concentrate too much on potential bodily defects and the accompanying thoughts, feelings and consequences. Therefore, it is likely that they assess their own body in a negative way. In line with that, Mulkens and Jansen (2009) found that students who were unsatisfied about their appearance tended to evaluate themselves as more unattractive after mirror gazing whereas students who were satisfied about their appearance showed increased levels of attractiveness about their own face after mirror gazing.
aim The authors conclude that attention towards themselves in a mirror may be a maintaining factor for disorders like bdd, perhaps because of a focus on ‘ugly’ facial parts. By means of task concentration training (TCT), it is attempted to retrain bdd patients to focus their attention more on the task and less on themselves.
method To this end, a series of case studies was undertaken in which tct (5 sessions) was added to cognitive therapy (ct, 10 sessions), in variable orders, and after a baseline of 5 weeks. Pre and post treatment measurements of BDD symptoms, mood and general psychopathology were taken, as well as continuous measurements (daily registrations of feelings, behaviours, the direction of attention, and the conviction of cognitions were registered by the patients).
results For each case, graphs were made for the various continuous measurements to investigate whether conviction of negative cognitions decreases especially during ct whereas the direction of attention specifically changes during TCT. The results of these case studies will be discussed at the conference.
conclusion The conclusion will follow at the conference.