Emotional eating and instructed food-cue processing in adolescents: An ERP study

Publication date: Available online 31 October 2017
Source:Biological Psychology
Author(s): Jia Wu, Cynthia J. Willner, Claire Hill, Pasco Fearon, Linda C. Mayes, Michael J. Crowley
We examined the P3 (250 to 500ms) and Late Positive Potential (LPP; 500 to 2000ms) event-related potentials (ERPs) to food vs. nonfood cues among adolescents reporting on emotional eating (EE) behavior. Eighty-six adolescents 10-17 years old were tested using an instructed food versus nonfood cue viewing task (imagine food taste) during high-density EEG recording. Self-report data showed that EE increased with age in girls, but not in boys. Both P3 and LPP amplitudes were greater for food vs. nonfood cues (food-cue bias). Exploratory analyses revealed that, during the LPP time period, greater EE was associated with a more positive food-cue bias in the fronto-central region. This heightened fronto-central food-cue bias LPP is in line with a more activated prefrontal attention system. The results suggest that adolescents with higher EE may engage more top-down cognitive resources to regulate their automatic emotional response to food cues, and/or they may exhibit greater reward network activation to food cues than do adolescents with lower EE, even in the absence of an emotional mood induction.



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