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Researcher Rossella Ventura worked with a team of scientists from the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome to study the links between stress and compulsive food-seeking.

"We used a new model of compulsive behavior to test whether a previous stressful experience of hunger might override a conditioned response to avoid a certain kind of food -- in this case, chocolate", she said.

Ventura and her colleagues said they first trained well-fed mice and starved mice to seek chocolate in one chamber rather than going into an empty chamber. They then added a mild electric shock to the chamber containing the chocolate. Unsurprisingly, the well-fed animals avoided the sweet treat.

However, mice that had previously been starved before being allowed to eat their way back to their normal weight with chocolate, resisted this conditioning and continued to seek chocolate despite the painful consequences.

That, the researchers said, is an index of compulsive behavior and it matches compulsive food seeking in the face of negative consequences in humans.

The research is detailed in the BioMed Central's journal Neuroscience.

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