Low weight eating disorders are severe psychiatric disorders that most often develop in adolescence, have a chronic course, and evidence poor response to treatment. A core feature of these disorders is food avoidance; which can be conceptualized in the research domain criteria (RDoC) framework as dysregulation in the dimensional expression of acute threat (i.e., food aversion) and reward learning (i.e., pleasurable response to food absence). The experiments underway in the parent project are designed to test whether a novel exposure paradigm might alter the IAVS reward neurocircuitry and affect food-cue reward learning in individuals with LW-ED. In this proposal, we expand we propose to develop a methodology to use dynamic time warping to better classify an individual's emotional valence during task-based fMRI. This approach differs from that outlined in the parent grant in that we will create individual classifiers to identify emotional responses rather than relying on absolute muscle activation. This will enhance the novelty and utility of the parent project by incorporating personalized physiological response parameters into the model of impaired aversive learning for analysis of IAVS neurocircuitry using fMRI while remaining within the scope of the parent project.
This project aims to test a novel neurobiological model of food avoidance in adolescent patients with low- weight eating disorders and healthy controls. We hypothesize hypersensitivity to internal bodily cues and dysregulation in reward learning as maintaining factors of food avoidance. This proposal will implement a computational approach to identify emotions from facial EMG data to apply to analysis of neural circuits.
