Name: Sarah Enouy
Area of Study: Personality/Social
In what program are you currently enrolled? PhD
What year of the program are you currently in? 1
Citation in APA format:
Enouy, S., Desrochers, J. E., Bossom, I., & Tabri, N. (2022). A p-curve analysis of the emotional Stroop effect among women with eating disorders. The International journal of eating disorders, 10.1002/eat.23807. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23807
Plain language abstract:
Concerns have been raised about the low quality of research examining attentional biases among women with eating disorders using the emotional Stroop task (i.e., a task where participants name the ink color of words). In the current research, we observed that the evidential value of primary research reporting differences between women with and without eating disorders was equivocal and had low statistical power. We recommend that future research take steps to improve the quality and reliability of emotional Stroop studies. Specifically, future studies should be designed with at least 80% power to detect an effect (i.e., a large enough sample size), and hypotheses should be clearly stated. Finally, future studies should report all sample demographics (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, gender, etc.) and take care to draw samples from diverse populations so that the findings are more generalizable.
How did the idea for this research come about?
Dr. Tabri’s lab was doing a lot of work on the emotional Stroop effect among people with eating disorders at the time and had identified many limitations within this literature. So, I decided to review the published emotional Stroop research among women with eating disorders to see if past studies have evidential value despite these limitations using a p-curve analysis.
How did you collect the data for this project?
We conducted a literature review of most published emotional Stroop research among women with eating disorders. When studies met our inclusion criteria, we extracted the key statistics from each paper to make up the p-curve.
Was the journal you published in the first journal you submitted this paper to?
Yes.
Why did you choose this journal?
There are three reasons for why I chose the International Journal of Eating Disorders (IJED). First, IJED supports the use of “open science” procedures (e.g., pre-registered, open-access data). Second, IJED recently published papers and a meta-review on attentional biases in eating disorders. The first two reasons signalled to us that IJED was a good fit. Third, IJED is the leading eating disorders journal.
How many other journals did you submit this paper to before it landed in the journal that eventually published your work?
0
What was your revision experience?
Our revision experience was very positive. We completed one round of revisions where we added mostly clarifying information. The p-curve analysis is new to many researchers still, so we added brief explanations of what it does, how it works, and why it is different from other review approaches like meta-analyses and systematic reviews. We also added important information on sample demographics, and discussed the external validity of findings to the broader population.
How many rounds of revision did you experience?
1
Did you need to collect new data to satisfy a reviewer?
No.
How long did it take from first submission to acceptance?
3 months
Was this paper conducted as part of your MA thesis?
No.
How did this project come about?
I was a student in Dr. Zelenski’s Open Science course. In this course, students were tasked with conducting a p-curve analysis on any topic of our choosing. Because of my interest in eating disorders, and the lab’s focus on the emotional Stroop effect, I chose to review this body of literature for my term paper. For the course, I reviewed ten studies from one meta-analysis and found that the results were favorable (i.e., there was technically evidential value in the literature), but weak. However, ten studies is not a large enough sample to have reliable results. So, after the term paper was submitted, I pre-registered my hypothesis and inclusion criteria, broadened the scope of the paper to include all published studies that met my inclusion criteria, and re-ran the p-curve with 50 papers.
Was this research conducted with your supervisor?
Yes, this research was conducted with my thesis supervisor, Dr. Nassim Tabri.
Was this research conducted with fellow graduate students in our program?
Yes, with Jessica Desrochers and Isabella Bossom.
Was this research conducted with researchers external to Carleton?
No.
You can access the article here.