The effect of body image dissatisfaction on goal-directed decision making in a population marked by negative appearance beliefs and disordered eating.

Eating disorders are associated with one of the highest mortality rates among all mental disorders, yet there is very little research about them within the newly emerging and promising field of computational psychiatry. As such, we focus on investigating a previously unexplored, yet core aspect of eating disorders-body image dissatisfaction. We continue a freshly opened debate about model-based learning and its trade-off against model-free learning-a proxy for goal-directed and habitual behaviour. We perform a behavioural study that utilises a two-step decision-making task and a reinforcement learning model to understand the effect of body image dissatisfaction on model-based learning in a population characterised by high scores of disordered eating and negative appearance beliefs, as recruited using Prolific. We find a significantly reduced model-based contribution in the body image dissatisfaction task condition in the population of interest as compared to a healthy control. This finding suggests general deficits in deliberate control in this population, leading to habitual, compulsive-like behaviours (body checking) dominating the experience. Importantly, the results may inform treatment approaches, which could focus on enhancing the reliance on goal-directed decision making to help cope with unwanted behaviours.

Abstract licence: CC BY

1. 9.

   Goals and Habits in the Brain · 2013

2. 13.

   Epidemiology of Eating Disorders: Incidence, Prevalence and Mortality Rates · 2012

3. 14.

   Disorders of compulsivity: a common bias towards learning habits · 2014

4. 25.

   Model-Based Influences on Humans' Choices and Striatal Prediction Errors · 2011

5. 29.

   Eating disorder NOS (EDNOS): an example of the troublesome “not otherwise specified” (NOS) category in DSM-IV · 2005

6. 31.

   Mapping anhedonia onto reinforcement learning: a behavioural meta-analysis · 2013

7. 38.

   Characterizing a psychiatric symptom dimension related to deficits in goal-directed control · 2016

33 more references, whose wording the paper’s licence keeps private.

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.