Looking Ahead

TEMPO: language-free reward phenotyping. Establish the autonomic and prefrontal signatures of two dissociable reward constructs — risk sensitivity and pursuit vigor — with research-grade physiology and wearable near-infrared imaging, using the Wheel of Fortune task, and confirm that a smartphone version reproduces them.

Reading vulnerability without words. Deploy the validated phone task and a consumer wearable in daily life across French- and German-speaking populations and networks in the US and Brazil, testing which signatures hold across languages and cultures, then build interpretable within-person models that detect, in near-real time, which construct of vulnerability is present — with no self-report entering the model, sidestepping the language bias my assessment work documents.

Just-in-time, mechanism-matched support. A microrandomized trial testing whether a brief intervention matched to the detected construct — a behavioral-activation nudge, including communal music — delivered the moment vulnerability arises improves proximal outcomes more than a mismatched, generic, or no intervention.

What drives the distortion. Use the Estimation Error Index (EEI) and reward-sensitivity tasks to identify what maintains eating pathology — loss of control over eating, negative urgency, and satiety responsiveness — and how these pathways differ across anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating.

Behavioral biomarkers that travel. Establish the EEI as a behavioral biomarker of eating pathology and treatment response — a normalized measure that separates true perceptual distortion from scale-use artifacts — alongside continued cross-cultural revision of core screening instruments (PHQ-9, SCOFF).

Communal music, scaled. Move the communal-music intervention from specialist-led delivery toward lay facilitators and teachers, in digital and in-person formats that reach people across ages and languages without depending on scarce clinical specialists.