Emotion Regulation Modulates Dietary Decision-Making via Activity in the Prefrontal–Striatal Valuation System

Abstract

The consumption of indulgent, carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods is often used as a strategy to cope with negative affect because they provide immediate self-reward. Such dietary choices, however, can severely affect people’s health. One countermeasure could be to improve one’s emotion regulation ability. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural activity underlying the downregulation of incidental emotions and its effect on subsequent food choices. We investigated whether emotion regulation leads to healthier food choices and how emotion regulation interacts with the brain’s valuation and decision-making circuitry. We found that 1) the downregulation of incidental negative emotions was associated with a subsequent selective increase in decisions for tasty but also for healthy foods, 2) food preferences were predicted by palatability but also by the current emotional state, and 3) emotion regulation modulated decision-related activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. These results indicate that emotional states are indeed important for food choice and that the process of emotion regulation might boost the subsequent processing of health attributes, possibly via neural reward circuits. In consequence, our findings suggest that increasing emotion regulation ability could effectively modulate food choices by stimulating an incidental upvaluation of health attributes.

Comparison of Food-Based and Music-Based Regulatory Strategies for (Un)Healthy Eating, Depression, Anxiety and Stress

“…There are many ways to regulate emotions [ 1 ]. People use both adaptive (e.g., regulation by music-listening to music) and maladaptive (e.g., regulation by unhealthy food or/with uncontrolled eating, excessive in intensity, frequency of eating) strategies to do this [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ]. Some of these strategies can have serious consequences [ 4 ].…”

“…People use both adaptive (e.g., regulation by music-listening to music) and maladaptive (e.g., regulation by unhealthy food or/with uncontrolled eating, excessive in intensity, frequency of eating) strategies to do this [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ]. Some of these strategies can have serious consequences [ 4 ]. For example, the long-term food-based emotional regulation strategy may be related to (over)eating unhealthy foods (e.g., comfort food incl.…”

“…[ 3 , 5 , 6 ], which in turn contributes to the development of obesity [ 7 , 8 ] and as a consequence significantly increases the risk of many somatic diseases [ 9 ]. Therefore, strategies should be sought that will have a more positive effect on health and will benefit both short-term and long-term physical and mental functioning [ 4 ].…”

Predicting fear and perceived health during the COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning: A cross-national longitudinal study.

“…To estimate the predictive value of the input features, we report the median permutation feature importance (PFI) for the better-performing model as the proportional loss of explained variance if the input is replaced by a random (noninformative) array of that variable (Breiman, 2001). The machine-learning methods employed here are the same as described in Morawetz et al (2020) in more detail.…”

Securing your relationship: Quality of intimate relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic can be predicted by attachment style

“…To estimate the predictive value of the input features, we report the median permutation feature importance for the better-performing model as the proportional loss of explained variance if the input is replaced by a random (noninformative) array of that variable (Breiman, 2001). The machine-learning methods employed here are the same as described in Morawetz et al (2020) (Fig. 1A).…”