Elke Smeets

elke.smeets@maastrichtuniversity.nl

My research focuses on the role of attentional biases in the etiology of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. An attentional bias refers to the tendency to selectively attend to particular (i.e., disorder relevant) information over other information (e.g., Mathews and MacLeod, 2005; Williamson et al. 2004). By measuring eye movements during body exposure, Jansen and colleagues (2005) found that eating disordered participants showed an attentional bias for their own ‘ugly’ body parts, whereas healthy participants showed an attentional bias for their own ‘beautiful’ body parts. In the current PhD project, I am conducting studies to investigate whether the attentional favouring of ‘ugly’ body parts is causal to body dissatisfaction.

Furthermore, I am interested in the exact mechanisms that account for the attentional favouring of body and food related information in eating disorder patients. Using a visual search task, we investigated whether the attentional bias for body and food in eating disorder patients could be explained by the faster detection of these stimuli in the environment (speeded detection), or by the inability to shift attention away from these stimuli once attention has been captured by them (slowed disengagement). Results indicated that speeded detection accounted for the attentional favouring of body related information, whereas slowed disengagement accounted for the attentional favouring of food related information.

Finally, the influence of Pro-Ana websites on body image in young adolescents is one of my interests.

I work as a tutor in the following courses:

Self-Control

Psychopathology

Research: How to do it

Eating disorders

Consciousness

History of psychology

Besides tutoring I am also supervising several bachelor theses and internships. If you are interested in conducting experimental research on the causes of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders, feel free to contact me.



Geraerts, E., Merckelbach, H., Jelicic, M., & Smeets, E.(in press). Long term consequences of suppression of intrusive thoughts and repressive coping. Behaviour, Research and Therapy.

Geraerts, E., Smeets, E., Jelicic, M., Merckelbach, H., & van Heerden, J. (in press). Retrieval inhibition of trauma-related words in women reporting repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Behaviour Research and Therapy.

Giesbrecht, T., Merckelbach, H., & Smeets, E. (in press). Thought suppression, dissociation, and context effects, Netherlands Journal of Psychology.

Merckelbach, H., Smeets, T., Geraerts, E., Jelicic, M., Bouwen, A., & Smeets, E. (in press). I haven’t thought about this for years! Dating recent recalls of vivid memories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20, 33-42.

Smeets, E., Roefs, A., van Furth, E., & Jansen, A. (2008). Attentional bias for body and food in eating disorders: slowed disengagement, speeded detection, or both. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 229-238. [Download PDF]

Geraerts, E., Merckelbach, H., Jelicic, M., Smeets, E., & van Heerden, J. (2006). Dissociative symptoms and how they relate to fantasy proneness in women reporting repressed or recovered memories. Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 1143-1151.

Geraerts, E., Smeets, E., Jelicic, M., van Heerden, J., & Merckelbach, H. (2005). Fantasy proneness, but not self-reported trauma is related to DRM performance of women reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 602-612.