Measuring wanting and liking from animals to humans: A systematic review

Pool, Eva; Sennwald, Vanessa; Delplanque, Sylvain; Brosch, Tobias; Sander, David

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.01.006

Scientific article

English

Measuring wanting and liking from animals to humans: A systematic review

Contributors

Pool, Eva; Sennwald, Vanessa; Delplanque, Sylvain

; Brosch, Tobias

; Sander, David

Published in

Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, vol. 63, p. 124-142

Publication date

2016

Abstract

Animal research has shown it is possible to want a reward that is not liked once obtained. Although these findings have elicited interest, human experiments have produced contradictory results, raising doubts about the existence of separate wanting and liking influences in human reward processing. This discrepancy could be due to inconsistences in the operationalization of these concepts. We systematically reviewed the methodologies used to assess human wanting and/or liking and found that most studies operationalized these concepts in congruency with the animal literature. Nonetheless, numerous studies operationalized wanting in similar ways to those that operationalized liking. These contradictions might be driven by a major source of confound: expected pleasantness. Expected pleasantness underlies cognitive desires and does not correspond to animal liking, a hedonic experience, or to animal wanting, which relies on affective relevance, consisting of the perception of a cue associated with a relevant reward for the organism's current physiological state. Extending the concept of affective relevance and differentiating it from expected pleasantness might improve measures of human wanting and liking.

Keywords

Affective relevance
Expected pleasantness
Incentive salience
Liking
Pleasure
Wanting

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Citation (ISO format)

POOL, Eva et al. Measuring wanting and liking from animals to humans: A systematic review. In: Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2016, vol. 63, p. 124–142. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.01.006

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

PID : unige:90359
DOI : 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.01.006

Journal ISSN

0149-7634

697views

913downloads

Creation

15/11/2016 16:06:00

First validation

15/11/2016 16:06:00

Update

13/10/2025 20:24:04

Status update

15/03/2023 01:10:38

Last indexation

31/08/2026 10:22:19

Measuring wanting and liking from animals to humans: A systematic review

Contributors

Published in

Publication date

Abstract

Keywords

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Citation (ISO format)

Main files (1)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation