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Coauthored with an international research team, Dr. Ji Lu's recent paper, "Feedback Dynamic between Emotional Reinforcement and Healthy Eating: An Application of the Reciprocal Markov Model" was accepted to receive the Best Paper Award for the 2013 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP 2013). The paper was presented at the University of California DC Center, Washington DC, April 3-5 at this well-recognized multidisciplinary conference presenting cutting-edge research in computational social science and related fields.

This award winning paper proposes a sophisticated model that examines emotion and eating behavior. Through over 9000 observations of participants' everyday eating behaviors, the analysis shows food choice can be influenced by preceding emotional state and previous meal quality. The results demonstrate that social setting is an important factor in specific conditions; particularly, eating away from home is more likely to be less healthy when prior emotional state is positive. The proposed model is an important addition to the statistical toolkit for analyzing various social-behavioral data.