Astrid Frankort

astrid.frankort@maastrichtuniversity.nl


My research topic is about the rewarding value of food in obesity and eating disorders. Palatable, high-caloric food is much more attractive to people with overweight than to normal-weight. Among other things, this has to do with the rewarding value of food, which is higher in overweight people. This rewarding value corresponds to activation of the reward circuit, which can be measured with an fMRI-scanner in our faculty (fMRI is the abbreviation of functional magnetic resonance imaging).

In my first fMRI-study, the activity of the reward circuit was measured in a group of overweight women as well as in normal-weight women, during the presentation in the scanner of food pictures. There were two conditions: first the participants saw the food pictures without any prior instruction, and subsequently in a second presentation they had to evaluate the taste of the shown food. After the measurement we looked at differences between groups. The expectation was that the overweight would show more activity than the normal-weight. This turned out to be the case only for the condition of taste evaluation. In the condition without instruction the opposite was found: here, there was more activity in the reward system of the normal-weight group. This result may have been influenced by the higher restraint status in the overweight group, which may have led to avoidance of the high-calorie palatable food stimuli.

My second fMRI study was an investigation of the influence of cue exposure with response prevention (CERP) on reward circuit activity. Participants in the experimental group smelled chocolate during an hour, but were not allowed to eat it. Participants in the control group smelled a pencil instead of chocolate. Regularly a short fMRI-scan was made during which the participants viewed pictures of chocolate and of neutral objects. We expected both an increase in subjective craving and in reward area activity after a short exposure (approximately 25 minutes, including interruptions by a scan) in the experimental group, compared to the control group. After a long exposure (approximately 60 minutes) an extinction of craving and corresponding reward activity was expected in the experimental group only. Preliminary analyses show that after a short exposure, brain reward activity remains high in the experimental group, contrary to the control group. Subjective craving was higher in the experimental than in the control group after the short exposure, although no group differences were found in subjective craving at baseline. In thowe brain reward areas showing a group difference in activity after a short exposure, this difference disappeared after the long exposure. However, subjective craving remained higher in the experimental as compared to the control group. We can conclude that, as expected, a short CERP is effectively increasing craving, both on a neural level and by subjective report. However, a long CERP was not successful in extinguishing subjective craving in the experimental group, probably due the exposure being too short or being interrupted too often by a scan.


I have been a tutor in the following courses:

• academic writing skills
• health psychology
• neuropsychological disorders
• paradigma's in het lab
• psychodiagnostiek
• psychopathologie
• statistiek II

Furthermore, I have supervised students' internships and theses.


Frankort, A. , Roefs, A., Siep, N., Roebroeck, A., Havermans, R., & Jansen, A. (2011). Reward activity in satiated overweight women is decreased during unbiased viewing but increased when imagining taste: an event-related fMRI study. International journal of obesity (2005). Advance online publication. doi:10.1038/ijo.2011.213. [Download PDF]