a b s t r a c tAnimal 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.

It has long been posited that among emotional stimuli, only negative threatening information modulates early shifts of attention. However, in the last few decades there has been an increase in research showing that attention is also involuntarily oriented toward positive rewarding stimuli such as babies, food, and erotic information. Because reproduction-related stimuli have some of the largest effects among positive stimuli on emotional attention, the present work reviews recent literature and proposes that the cognitive and cerebral

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Outcome-specific and general Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfers (PIT) affect our everyday decisionmaking behavior in 2 ways. Upon the perception of a reward-paired cue, the former selects and determines the direction of the action performed to obtain the reward, whereas the latter determines the vigor with which the action is performed. In the present study, we aimed to validate a paradigm to successfully measure both of these motivational biases toward cues associated with sexual rewards. Within the same paradigm and participants, we demonstrated the existence of outcome-specific PIT, in which participants mobilized more effort for the action associated with a specific sexual reward in the presence of its paired cue, as well as the existence of general PIT, in which participants mobilized more effort for any action associated with a sexual reward in the presence of sexual reward-paired cues than in the presence of a neutral cue. These findings contribute to the literature by providing a paradigm that could potentially help to better understand sexual desire and develop therapeutic interventions for people suffering from sexual desire disorders.

Contrary to the emotions we feel in everyday contexts, the emotions we feel for fictional characters do not seem to require a belief in the existence of their object. This observation has given birth to a famous philosophical paradox (the ‘paradox of fiction’), and has led some philosophers to claim that the emotions we feel for fictional characters are not genuine emotions but rather “quasi-emotions”. Since then, the existence of quasi-emotions has been a hotly debated issue. Recently, philosophers and psychologists have proposed to solve this debate by using empirical methods and experimentally studying differences between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ emotions. In this paper, our goal is to assess the success of these attempts. We begin by surveying the existing empirical literature and stressing the methodological problems that plague most studies that might seem relevant to the debate, before focusing on recent studies that avoid this pitfall. We then argue that, due to conceptual problems, these studies fail to be relevant to the philosophical debate and emphasise new directions for future empirical research on the topic.