5 research outputs found

    Preference for Safe Over Risky Options in Binge Eating.

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    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

    Behavioral characteristics in neutral condition for the four groups.

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    <p>Mean (standard deviation) are reported for quantitative parameters.</p><p>*Error effect: difference of error rates between incongruent and congruent trials **Interference effect: difference of reaction times between incongruent and congruent trials.</p

    Model used to investigate the association between backward reasoning in the Race Game in the food condition and approach or avoidance behaviors, under the influence of anxiety (Figure A).

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    <p>Food approach behavior was determined by the shared variance of the reaction time (RT) at correct Go trials between food and neutral/relaxing conditions with neutral/relaxing data as a reference. Food avoidance behavior was determined in a similar manner, using the stressful and food conditions. Similar reasoning was carried out for “food specific” anxiety arousal and coefficient of variation of reaction time (CV-RT). Bold arrows represent reference loadings for latent variables (ellipses) and have a factor loading set to 1. Standardized coefficients are reported for Bulimia Nervosa (BN) and Anorexia Nervosa Binging subtype (ANB) patients (Figure B and supplementary table ST4 in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0105657#pone.0105657.s002" target="_blank">file S2</a>). **: p<0.05.</p
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