Friend's eating disorder inspires International manuscript for Brentwood School pupil

Brentwood School Sixth Form boarding student, Julieanna Ouyang, has been invited to speak at an international conference in China and present her research into attentional bias and eating disorders.

Seventeen-year-old Julieanna, whose in-depth study was inspired by a friend who has since recovered from an eating disorder, completed her manuscript outside of school hours and under own steam.

She should present her manuscript ’A Review of Attention Bias and Eating Disorder’ to the 2021 International Conference on Public Relations and Social Sciences (ICPRSS) which will be held in Kunming, China, in September.

The aim of IPRSS 2021 is to bring together innovative academics and industrial experts in the field of Public Relations, Social Sciences and other research areas. The primary goal of the conference is to promote scientific information interchange between researchers, developers, students, and practitioners working all around the world. The conference will be held every year to make it an ideal platform for people to share views and experiences.

Julieanna said: ”Quite a lot of things inspired me to write this review. I’ve always been interested in psychology and I study psychology as a higher level International Baccalaureate course, which I find fascinating.”

The ICPRSS programme started in January and Julieanna ‘attended’ several months of lectures and mentor sessions through Zoom. “I came up with this topic as one of my friends had an eating disorder when she was younger and fortunately recovered from it, which made me want to find out how eating behaviours could be affected psychology (cognitively) and what are the future treatments.”

Julieanna worked on the manuscript, via Zoom, with a fellow IB student who attends an international school in China. “We had some problems with the time difference but managed to solve them!” she explained.

If on-going Coronavirus restrictions mean Julieanna is unable to present her manuscript to the conference in person, her hard work will still be included on Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research scholarly articles.