Nicolette Siep

nicolette.siep@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Project title: “Eating too much or too little. Individual differences in neural representations of food reward within the brain and its implications for understanding abnormal eating behavior.”

Abstract: Patients with Anorexia Nervosa eat too little, whereas obese people eat too much. A still unanswered question is why these persons demonstrate such abnormal eating. A possible answer to this question is that the rewarding value of food is smaller for anorexia patients as compared to healthy controls, whereas for obese persons food reward value is larger as compared to normal-weight controls. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides the means to objectively test this particular hypothesis. The primary question of the preset project is thus whether there are individual differences in the neural representation of food reward presumed to be associated with abnormal eating behavior observed in anorexia patients and obese people. The main hypothesis are that anorexia patients show less activation in the areas related to the processing of the rewarding value of food cues (i.e., the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala) as compared to healthy controls, and that obese persons show increased activation in these same corticolimbic regions as compared to normal-weight controls.




Siep, N., Roefs, A., Roebroeck, A., Havermans, R., Bonte, M.L., & Jansen, A.(2009). Hunger is the best spice: An fMRI study of the effects of attention, hunger and calorie content on food reward processing in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. Behavioral Brain Research, 198, 149-158.

Siep, N., Havermans, R., Roefs, A., & Jansen, A. (2008). Als het plezier in eten verdwijnt: een hypothese over de rol van voedseldevaluatie bij Anorexia Nervosa. De Psycholoog, 43, 405-410.