Emily Barkley-Levenson
Hofstra University, NY·Psychology
Anorexia nervosa is the deadliest psychiatric illness, yet no one knows what causes it, and the best available psychological treatments often fall short. One promising angle is decision-making: people with the disorder keep restricting food despite severe personal and physical cost, which suggests something unusual in how they weigh choices.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
anorexia nervosa
eating disorders
decision-making
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Test whether females aged 16-22 with restricting-type anorexia nervosa show greater aversion to ambiguous outcomes than matched healthy controls on a validated choice task that separates risky from ambiguous gambles.
- Determine whether their choice behavior departs from prevailing computational models of value-based decision-making, using model fitting to behavioral choice data from 65 patients and 65 controls.
- Compare brain activity between groups during ambiguous versus risky decisions with functional neuroimaging, testing for differential engagement of frontostriatal circuits linking prefrontal cortex and striatum.
- Assess whether behavioral and neural measures of ambiguity aversion relate to body mass index, dietary restriction and cognitive symptoms, both at baseline and at six-month follow-up in the anorexia nervosa group.
More about the research
Previous studies pointing to altered sensitivity to risk and altered activity in frontostriatal circuits — brain pathways connecting the front of the brain to deeper reward-related structures — have produced mixed results, probably because they lumped together different components of choice and ignored context.
Why it matters
Treatments for anorexia nervosa work only partially, in part because the thought processes that keep the illness going are poorly described. Pinpointing whether an aversion to unknown outcomes, rather than to known risk, maintains dietary restriction — and finding its brain signature — could let clinicians revise models of how the disorder persists and design interventions aimed at that specific process, potentially in patients whose symptoms would otherwise continue.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Konova
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience
Test whether experimentally induced craving shifts the brain's drug-specific value signals in 89 patients with opioid use disorder, using a value-based choice task during fMRI with craving and control sessions.
Carolina Makowski
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify behavioral and neuroimaging correlates of eating disorders in youth from the ABCD Study (ages 11–14) and in a clinical sample of adolescent girls in treatment (ages 13–18), using measures of brain shape and whole-brain microstructure.
Pamela Keel
Florida State University, FL·Psychology
Compare eating disorder prevalence and symptom scores across five random cohorts of college students surveyed in 1982, 1992, 2002, 2012 and 2022 to measure generational change.
The school
Hofstra University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $10M a year on research, 95 research doctorates a year.
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