Several mental health problems such as addictions or binge eating are caracterized by problematic reward seeking behaviors, where individuals will invest a considerable amount of effort to obtain an object of their desire, even though once they obtain the object they do not experience it as pleasant.  A very clear example of this occurs in the case of addiction where individuals are willing to go to extraordinary lengths in order to obtain a substance even though after a period of time the drug itself elicits no pleasurable feelings during its consumption.

Our research focuses on gaining insights into how and why the human brain is vulnerable to situations where choice behavior is hijacked in service of outcomes that are no longer valued by the individual. To this end, we run large-scale longitudinal studies using reinforcement learning algorithms to model individual differences in affective learning and aiming at identifying profiles of vulnerability and resilience to problematic reward seeking behaviors. We are also aiming at identifying mechanisms that could account for the emergence of common comorbidities between problematic reward seeking behaviors and other mental health problems such as anxiety.