Preference for Safe Over Risky Options in Binge Eating
Binge eating has been usually viewed as a loss of control and an impulsive behavior. But, little is known about the actual behavior of binging patients (prevalently women) in terms of basic decision-making under risk or under uncertainty. In healthy women, stressful cues bias behavior for safer opti...
Saved in:
Published in | Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience Vol. 10; p. 65 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Switzerland
Frontiers Research Foundation
31.03.2016
Frontiers Frontiers Media S.A |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | Binge eating has been usually viewed as a loss of control and an impulsive behavior. But, little is known about the actual behavior of binging patients (prevalently women) in terms of basic decision-making under risk or under uncertainty. In healthy women, stressful cues bias behavior for safer options, raising the question of whether food cues that are perceived as threatening by binging patients may modulate patients' behaviors towards safer options. A cross-sectional study was conducted with binging patients (20 bulimia nervosa (BN) and 23 anorexia nervosa binging (ANB) patients) and two control groups (22 non-binging restrictive (ANR) anorexia nervosa patients and 20 healthy participants), without any concomitant impulsive disorder. We assessed decisions under risk with a gambling task with known probabilities and decisions under uncertainty with the balloon analog risk taking task (BART) with unknown probabilities of winning, in three cued-conditions including neutral, binge food and stressful cues. In the gambling task, binging and ANR patients adopted similar safer attitudes and coherently elicited a higher aversion to losses when primed by food as compared to neutral cues. This held true for BN and ANR patients in the BART. After controlling for anxiety level, these safer attitudes in the food condition were similar to the ones under stress. In the BART, ANB patients exhibited a higher variability in their choices in the food compared to neutral condition. This higher variability was associated with higher difficulties to discard irrelevant information. All these results suggest that decision-making under risk and under uncertainty is not fundamentally altered in all these patients. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 PMCID: PMC4815053 Edited by: Tobias Kalenscher, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany These authors have contributed equally to this work. Reviewed by: Bernd Weber, Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität, Germany; Silvia U. Maier, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Friederike Barthels, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Germany |
ISSN: | 1662-5153 1662-5153 |
DOI: | 10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00065 |