Negative affect influences the computations underlying food choice in bulimia nervosa.

Negative affect amplifies the bias toward tastiness over healthiness in food choices, especially in individuals with bulimia nervosa, with a 3-month binge episode prediction.

• Why it matters: Understanding how negative emotions influence food decision-making can clarify mechanisms behind binge eating in bulimia nervosa and inform targeted interventions.
• What they did: Researchers used a randomized crossover design with 25 women with BN and 21 controls, inducing neutral or negative affect, then applying a time-varying diffusion decision model to assess food choice dynamics for high- and low-fat foods.
• The result: Negative affect increased the bias toward considering tastiness first, particularly in BN individuals, and this heightened bias predicted more frequent subjective binge episodes over three months.