Behavioural control in eating disorders
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Behavioural control in eating disorders: exploring proactive and reactive inhibition
IRAS ID
151594
Contact name
Savani Bartholdy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 0 days
Research summary
Inhibitory control (IC) is the ability to regulate or control your own behaviour. This includes stopping actions, or controlling your urges. IC has been implicated in the development and maintenance of eating disorders (EDs), as patients tend to perform unusually well or unusually poorly on tasks of self-control. For example, patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) are exceptionally good at such tasks (Steinglass et al., 2012). In contrast, people with bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge eating disorder (BED) are often more impulsive both generally and particularly around food (e.g., Hege et al., 2014). Unusually weak or strong IC is thought to translate into loss of control or over-control of food intake (Dawe & Loxton, 2004).
Most research on IC has studied people’s ability to stop a response that has already been started when they see a “stop” cue, a process termed reactive inhibition. However, humans in a novel or uncertain context tend to be cautious about acting. It is suggested that this reflects a “proactive” type of inhibition which has not yet been studied in ED (Boulinguez et al., 2009), but may help to explain some of their behaviours. For example, in BN and BED, limited ability to stop eating in spite of a lack of hunger may indicate a weakness in proactive inhibition. In contrast, patients with AN may have strong proactive inhibition and are unable to switch it off, particularly around food. This study will compare different forms of IC abilities (namely reactive inhibition, proactive inhibition and temporal discounting (the ability to delay rewards)) in individuals with AN, BN and BED to individuals without an ED.
REC name
London - Bloomsbury Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/0251
Date of REC Opinion
21 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion