Journal article
Impaired belief updating and devaluation in adult women with bulimia nervosa
TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY, v 13(1), 2
06 Jan 2023
PMID: 36604416
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Recent models of bulimia nervosa (BN) propose that binge-purge episodes ultimately become automatic in response to cues and insensitive to negative outcomes. Here, we examined whether women with BN show alterations in instrumental learning and devaluation sensitivity using traditional and computational modeling analyses of behavioral data. Adult women with BN (n = 30) and group-matched healthy controls (n = 31) completed a task in which they first learned stimulus-response-outcome associations. Then, participants were required to repeatedly adjust their responses in a baseline test , when different sets of stimuli were explicitly devalued, and in a slips-of-action test , when outcomes instead of stimuli were devalued. The BN group showed intact behavioral sensitivity to outcome devaluation during the slips-of-action test, but showed difficulty overriding previously learned stimulus-response associations on the baseline test. Results from a Bayesian learner model indicated that this impaired performance could be accounted for by a slower pace of belief updating when a new set of previously learned responses had to be inhibited (p = 0.036). Worse performance and a slower belief update in the baseline test were each associated with more frequent binge eating (p = 0.012) and purging (p = 0.002). Our findings suggest that BN diagnosis and severity are associated with deficits in flexibly updating beliefs to withhold previously learned responses to cues. Additional research is needed to determine whether this impaired ability to adjust behavior is responsible for maintaining automatic and persistent binge eating and purging in response to internal and environmental cues.
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Details
- Title
- Impaired belief updating and devaluation in adult women with bulimia nervosa
- Publication Details
- TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY, v 13(1), 2
- Publisher
- SPRINGERNATURE; LONDON
- Grant note
- This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (F32MH108311) and the Hilda and Preston Davis Foundation to LAB. LAB is currently supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (K23MH118418; R21MH124352; R01MH126448; R21MH129898), a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and a Feeding Hope Fund Research Grant from the National Eating Disorders Association. V.G.F. is supported by the Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC VISN 2) at the James J. Peter Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Bronx, NY and by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R21MH129898). The authors would like to thank and acknowledge Dr. Mary Ellen Trunko, Danika Peterson, Dr. Christina Wierenga, and the staff at the UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research for their assistance with participant recruitment and screening. In addition, the authors thank Dr. Xiaosi Gu and Dr. Daniela Schiller for feedback on the computational models.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Drexel University
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000909554200001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85145645390
- Other Identifier
- 991021861284804721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Psychiatry