Rouhani Nina, Grossman Cooper D, Feusner Jamie, Tusche Anita
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Mar 26;16(1):2938. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-57872-w.
Food seeking and avoidance engage primary reward systems to drive behavior. It is nevertheless unclear whether innate or learned food biases interact with general reward processing to interfere with goal-directed choice. To this end, we recruited a large non-clinical sample of females with high eating-disorder symptoms ('HED') and a matched sample of females with low eating-disorder symptoms ('LED') to complete a reward-learning task where the calorie content of food stimuli was incidental to the goal of maximizing monetary reward. We find and replicate a low-calorie food bias in HED and a high-calorie food bias in LED, reflecting the strength of pre-experimental food-reward associations. An emotional arousal manipulation shifts this group-dependent bias across individual differences, with interoceptive awareness predicting this change. Reinforcement-learning models further identify distinct cognitive components supporting these group-specific food biases. Our results highlight the influence of reinforcement-based mechanisms and emotional arousal in eliciting potentially maladaptive food-reward associations.
觅食和避食行为会激活主要的奖励系统来驱动行为。然而，尚不清楚先天的或后天习得的食物偏好是否会与一般奖励处理过程相互作用，从而干扰目标导向的选择。为此，我们招募了大量有高饮食失调症状的女性非临床样本（“HED”）和与之匹配的低饮食失调症状女性样本（“LED”），以完成一项奖励学习任务，其中食物刺激的卡路里含量与最大化金钱奖励的目标无关。我们发现并重复了HED组对低热量食物的偏好和LED组对高热量食物的偏好，这反映了实验前食物奖励关联的强度。情绪唤醒操作会使这种基于群体的偏好因个体差异而发生变化，其中内感受性意识可预测这种变化。强化学习模型进一步识别出支持这些特定群体食物偏好的不同认知成分。我们的结果突出了基于强化的机制和情绪唤醒在引发潜在适应不良的食物奖励关联中的影响。
