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THEORY-893: Reward has separable components: 'liking', its hedonic impact, measurable without report by orofacial taste reactivity in humans, apes, monkeys and rodents, and 'wanting', its incentive salience; brain stimulation and sensitization can raise 'wanting' without raising 'liking', so motivation can grow while pleasure stays flat or falls, and 'liking' reactions can occur without any subjective feeling of pleasure

3 min read

Properties7
StatusProposed
Version3
Tagsemotion-and-affect, motivation, neuroscience
SourceLIT-1459 — Pleasure systems in the brain
Bears onQUESTION-266 — Can felt valence be operationalized, for systems that report and systems that cannot, by three layers measured independently, an ordering serving as the negotiation's potential in the system's conflicts, a hedonic marker that does not depend on choice, and the system's own model of its potential, and do the layers dissociate where the potential account and its rivals say they should?
SupportsCLAIM-438 — An ordering serving as the negotiation's potential, as the potential account of valence defines it, tracks 'wanting', not 'liking': sensitized incentive salience wins a system's conflicts, persists and resumes while hedonic impact measured by taste reactivity stays flat or falls, so the regime the account calls hedonic valence is motivational valence, and hedonic valence, if it is anywhere in the account, is elsewhere, CLAIM-433 — The potential account of valence is an account of goal-conduciveness valence, not of intrinsic pleasantness: on the component process model's separation of levels of valence, the ordering that prevails ranks states by need satisfaction and goal attainment, the potential's strength tracks 'wanting' and its sign tracks goal conduciveness, while 'liking' is a separate appraisal with its own ordering; so the wanting–liking dissociation is two valence systems coming apart, as that separation predicts, and the objection that the account is not about pleasure is conceded rather than answered, CLAIM-437 — 'Wanting' and 'liking' are saliences relative to different, overlapping processes, pursuit and consummation, each ranking states by their bearing on its own concerns; valence is then relative to a perspective, every perspective in the negotiation has its own, the system's valence is that of the perspective whose ordering is the negotiation's potential, and ambivalence is strong saliences of opposite sign with no potential absorbing them
CorroboratesCLAIM-447 — Model-based wanting is a pursuit process's ranking of the futures it predicts under candidate interventions, P(S | do(a)) against P(S | do(a₀)), while cue-triggered wanting is learned salience that need not compute those futures; a process's causal model, its wanting and its practical efficacy are separable, so learning to want differently, learning that a want will not pay, and learning not to act on it are three different changes

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Source

Berridge and Kringelbach (2015), “Pleasure systems in the brain”, Neuron 86(3):646–664 (LIT-1459), read in full in NOTE-1110 from the NIH author manuscript. It is unpaginated, so locations are by section.

What was actually shown

A review of the authors’ programme and others’.

  • Three components. “liking (core reactions to hedonic impact), wanting (motivation process of incentive salience), and learning (Pavlovian or instrumental associations and cognitive representations)” (A neuroscience of pleasure).
  • A non-report measure of ‘liking’. Orofacial reactions to sweet and bitter tastes: “Homologous ‘liking’ orofacial expressions can be elicited also in apes and monkeys, and even in rats and mice” (Objective hedonic reactions).
  • ‘Wanting’ without ‘liking’. “LH stimulation failed to enhance ‘liking’ reactions to sweetness, even though it made the rats ‘want’ to eat at least four times more than normal amounts” (‘Pleasure electrodes’). In addiction, incentive sensitization would “selectively magnif[y] cue-triggered ‘wanting’ to take the drug again, and so powerfully cause motivation even if the drug became less pleasant” (Resolving the cocaine puzzle?).
  • ‘Liking’ without feeling. “objective hedonic ‘liking’ reactions can sometimes occur alone and unconsciously in ordinary people without any subjective pleasure feeling at all” (Subjective versus objective levels).

What could have come out otherwise: manipulations that raise pursuit raising taste reactivity with it.

What this does not say

  • That ‘wanting’ is not valenced. The review says “Motivational salience is never neutral, but its valence is not fixed” (Incentive salience as sham reward).
  • That taste reactivity measures pleasure outside taste. It is a marker for one modality.
  • That the dissociation has been read here first-hand. The record holds the review, not the primary studies.

Connections

It bears directly on CLAIM-440, which identifies hedonic valence with an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential; CLAIM-438 is the objection filed from it. Dayan and Berridge on model-based and model-free Pavlovian learning (LIT-584) is the record’s earlier reading from the same programme. For QUESTION-266, taste reactivity is a layer-2 marker that does not depend on choice.

Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back

The record holds the wanting–liking dissociation only as Berridge and Kringelbach’s review reports it; NOTE-1110 read none of the primary experiments. No primary study the record reads raises incentive salience by choice, effort or cue-triggered pursuit while taste reactivity stays flat, replicated outside the originating laboratories. The title’s sensitization clause is the review’s proposal (“Incentive-sensitization would produce addiction, by selectively magnifying cue-triggered ‘wanting’”), which THEORY-895 reads and holds to its own unmet promote_when.

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