Research

AllTHEMES

• Anorexia Nervosa
• Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder
• Binge Eating Disorder
• Body image
• Boulimia nervosa
• Brain processes
• Child eating behavior
• Cognitive processes and biases
• Craving
• Emotional eating
• Executive functioning & cognitive control
• Interventions, treatment
• Learning/conditioning processes
• Obesity
• Reward value of eating
• Taste and satiety
• Weight loss & dieting

TASTE AND SATIETY

Taste and satiety
The hedonic evaluation of flavors plays an important role in eating behavior: People eat what they like and refrain from eating anything they do not like. This sounds simple enough, but what exactly determines our food likes and dislikes? Specific taste preferences are not innate, which suggests that these preferences are learned. Therefore, important questions within this research theme are which learning processes play an important role in the evaluation of tastes and what factors affect these learning processes. Related questions are to what degree learning is important in the development and maintenance of aberrant eating behavior such as self-induced starvation (as observed in Anorexia Nervosa patients) or binge eating (as observed in Bulimia Nervosa patients), and whether we can apply these learning processes to establish more healthy dietary habits.