Author Alice Ely, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, had already studied how women's brains respond to images of fatty foods on an empty and full stomach and found that both their hunger status and dieting history did
influence brain activation patterns.
Moreover, the
patterns of
activation and deactivation of
brain regions in response to affective stimuli or in the course of mildly anxiogenic tasks vary quantitatively across subjects and can be predicted in part by individual differences in proneness to experience negative emotionality and anxiety, and by some polymorphic genes that
influence behavior.