Kent C. Berridge & Morten L. Kringelbach (2015), Neuron 86(3):646–664 — DOI-10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.018
Key takeaways
- Three components of reward. Reward is “liking (core reactions to hedonic impact), wanting (motivation process of incentive salience), and learning (Pavlovian or instrumental associations and cognitive representations)”. Their mechanisms can be told apart (“A neuroscience of pleasure”).
- Liking in quotes is objective. ‘Liking’ names a measurable hedonic reaction, neural or behavioural. Plain liking is the subjective experience. The two are measured independently, and “Subjective ratings are not always more accurate about hedonic impact than objective hedonic reactions”.
- Taste reactivity measures liking without report. Sweet tastes draw tongue protrusions and lip licking, and bitter tastes draw gapes. These reactions are homologous in newborn humans, apes, monkeys, rats and mice. They track satiety, and they come apart from intake and seeking under dopamine blockade.
- Hotspots generate liking. Each hotspot is about 1 mm³ in the rat. One lies in the rostrodorsal medial shell of nucleus accumbens, and one in the posterior ventral pallidum, the one site whose loss abolishes liking. Candidates are emerging in orbitofrontal cortex, insula and parabrachial nucleus. Opioid stimulation in a hotspot can double sweetness ‘liking’. Dopamine stimulation at the same site raises ‘wanting’ and leaves ‘liking’ unchanged.
- Wanting without liking. Dopamine elevation, lateral hypothalamic stimulation (the rats ate four times as much while their reactions to sweetness grew no more positive) and the deep-brain electrodes of Heath and of Schlaepfer et al. all raise ‘wanting’ without ‘liking’. Incentive sensitization explains addiction as wanting magnified while liking stays flat or tolerates.
- Liking can be unconscious. Objective ‘liking’ can occur “alone and unconsciously … without any subjective pleasure feeling at all” and still change goal-directed behaviour.
- An affective keyboard. Running front to back along the accumbens shell, local inhibition releases desire and then dread. Environment and cortex can retune it.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 for the record’s account of valence as potential of an ordering (TERM-076, CLAIM-440). Its dissociation of ‘wanting’ from ‘liking’ is the strongest empirical pressure the account has met so far. Its taste-reactivity measure is the best candidate the record has for a hedonic marker that does not depend on choice, the second of the three layers. Read in NOTE-1110.