Emotional food-cue-reactivity in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa: An electroencephalography study.

OBJECTIVE

Food-cue-reactivity entails neural and experiential responses to the sight and smell of attractive foods. Negative emotions can modulate such cue-reactivity and this might be central to the balance between restrictive versus bulimic symptomatology in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN).

METHOD: Pleasantness ratings and electrocortical responses to food images were measured in patients with AN (n = 35), BN (n = 32) and matched healthy controls (HC, n = 35) in a neutral state and after idiosyncratic negative emotion induction while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The EEG data were analyzed using a mass testing approach.

RESULTS

Individuals with AN showed reduced pleasantness for foods compared to objects alongside elevated widespread occipito-central food-object discrimination between 170 and 535 ms, indicative of strong neural cue-reactivity. Food-object discrimination was further increased in the negative emotional condition between 690 and 1200 ms over centroparietal regions. Neither of these effects was seen in individuals with BN.

DISCUSSION: Emotion modulated food-cue-reactivity in AN might reflect a decreased appetitive response in negative mood. Such specific (emotion-)regulatory strategies require more theoretical work and clinical attention. The absence of any marked effects in BN suggests that emotional cue-reactivity might be less prominent in this group or quite specific to certain emotional contexts or food types.

PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE: Negative affectivity is a risk factor for the development of eating disorders and individuals with eating disorders experience problems with emotion regulation. To better understand the effects of negative emotions, the present study investigated how they affected neural correlates of food perception in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.