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Purpose: A growing body of evidence has shown that electroencephalography (EEG) is an interesting method of assessing the underlying brain physiology associated with disordered eating. Using EEG, we sought to evaluate brain reactivity to hyper-palatable food cues in undergraduate students with disordered eating behavior (DEB). Methods: After assessing the eating behaviors of twenty-six undergraduate students using the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), electroencephalographic signals were recorded while the participants were presented with pictures of hyper-palatable food. The current study used a temporospatial principal component analysis (PCA) approach to identify event-related potential (ERP) responses that differed between DEB and non-DEB individuals. Results: A temporospatial PCA applied to the ERPs identified a positivity with a maximum amplitude at 347 ms at the occipital–temporal electrodes in response to pictures of hyper-palatable food. This positivity was correlated with the EAT-26 scores. Participants with DEB showed reduced positivities in this component compared with those without DEB. Conclusion: Our findings may reflect greater motivated attention toward hyper-palatable food cues in undergraduate students with DEB. These results are an important step toward obtaining a more refined understanding of specific abnormalities related to reactivity to food cues in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional states can guide the actions and decisions we make in our everyday life through their influence on cognitive processes such as working memory (WM). We investigated the long-lasting interference that an unpleasant emotional state had on goal-relevantWMrepresentations from an electrophysiological perspective. Participants performed a change detection task that was preceded by the presentation of unpleasant or neutral task-irrelevant pictures in a blocked fashion. We focused on the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential that is sensitive to the number of task-relevant items stored in WM. We found that the asymptotic limit for the CDA amplitude was lower during the unpleasant emotional state than during the neutral one; that is, an emotional state was capable of reducing how many task-relevant items the participants could hold in WM. Furthermore, both the individuals who experienced more intrusive thoughts and those who were dispositionally anxious were more susceptible to the influence of the emotional state. We provide evidence that an unpleasant emotional state diminished visualWMfor task-relevant items, particularly in susceptible individuals. These results open new avenues to uncover the emotional-cognitive processing that underlies maladaptiveWMrepresentations and the role of such processing in the development of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Emotions can influence consumers' food purchasing choices. • Front-of-pack labelling may affect food-evoked emotional responses. • Brain event-related potentials provide information about food-evoked emotions. • Neuroscience-based measures can be applied in studies on public health nutrition. Front-of-pack labelling (FoPL) systems are essential nutrition policy tools that can help consumers identify when food products contain an excessive amount of critical nutrients, such as sugars, saturated/trans fats, and sodium. FoPL systems can modify consumer behaviour by decreasing consumers' desire to purchase such products. Emotions significantly influence consumers' purchase decisions; thus, research on the performance of FoPL systems should measure emotions. However, measuring emotional responses to food may be challenging because the dimensional aspects of emotions can be difficult to verbalize. The emotional content of visual stimuli, such as food, activates brain responses that can be assessed using the event-related potential technique (ERP), in which brain responses to specific stimuli are extracted from the electroencephalographic brain signal. In this review, we address how and why the ERP would help answer questions about the impact of FoPL systems on food-evoked emotions. We hope that this review bridges the fields of neuroscience and consumer food research and provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]