Dissociated conditional-associative learning in anorexia nervosa

This study assessed the acquisition of conditional-associations using neutral and individually threatening nouns in 16 females with anorexia nervosa (AN), 16 females with bulimia nervosa (BN) and 16 normal controls (NC). Groups did not differ in terms of age, sex, handedness, depression, intelligence, verbal memory and verbal fluency measures. Furthermore, patients and controls were widely comparable on any test assessing neuropsychological functioning. In the conditional-associative learning (CAL) task, anorexic patients displayed an impaired performance with neutral material but not with individually threatening material. Such a deficit was not evident in bulimics or in normal controls. Only anorexics showed a dissociation in the CAL of material with different emotional valence. These findings support the assumptions from functional neuroimaging investigations in AN and justify the assignment of this disorder to the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.