Implicit measures of “wanting” and “liking” in humans

Abstract

Incentive Sensitization Theory (IST; e.g., Robinson & Berridge, 1993; suggests that a common dopamine system that deals with incentive salience attribution is affected by different types of drugs. Repeated drug use will sensitize this neural system, which means that drugs increasingly trigger the experience of incentive salience or "wanting". Importantly, Robinson and Berridge stress that there is a dissociation between drug "wanting" (the unconscious attribution of incentive salience) and drug "liking" (the unconscious hedonic experience when one consumes drugs). Whereas the former plays an essential role in the development and maintenance of drug addiction, the latter does not. Although this model was based mainly on research with non-human animals, more recently the dissociation between "wanting" and "liking" has been examined in humans as well. A widely used and promising means of studying these processes are behavioral implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), different types of StimulusResponse Compatibility (SRC) tasks, and Affective Simon Tasks (AST).IST makes the clear prediction that (1) there should be a positive correlation between indices of "wanting" (e.g., drug consumption) and implicit "wanting" scores. Similarly, there should be a positive correlation between indices of "liking" (e.g., various expressions of subjective pleasure) and implicit "liking" scores; (2) there should be higher "wanting" scores in substance abusers or frequent substance users compared to non-users or infrequent users, and there should be no differences in "liking" between these groups (or even less "liking" in frequent substance users); (3) manipulations of "wanting" should affect implicit "wanting" scores whereas manipulations of "liking" should affect implicit "liking" scores. However, studies that tested these hypotheses did not produce equivocal results. To shed light on these discrepancies, we first discuss the different definitions of "wanting" and "liking" and the different tests that have been used to assess these processes. Then, we discuss whether it is 3 reasonable to assume that these tests are valid measures of "wanting" and "liking" and we review correlational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies that inform us about this issue. Finally, we discuss the future potential of implicit measures in research on IST and make several recommendations to improve both theory and methodology. 4

Implicit and Explicit Associations with Erotic Stimuli in Women with and Without Sexual Problems

“…Correlations between implicit measures of liking and wanting and explicit ratings in the present study were nonsignificant. This finding is in line with the low or absent correlations between these measures found in other populations (see for a review and a meta-analysis: Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt, 2005;Tibboel, De Houwer, & Van Bockstaele, 2015). The current finding of significant differences in the explicit appraisal of erotic stimuli between women with and without sexual problems replicates previous research into the role of explicit cognitions in sexual functioning (Andersen et al, 1999;Nobre & Pinto-Gouveia, 2009;Peixoto & Nobre, 2014, 2016Quinta Gomes & Nobre, 2012).…”

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

“…The difference in reaction times between the two blocks is thought to reflect the strength of the association between a target category and its compatible attribute. This task has been adapted to measure the strength of an implicit association between the representation of a particular reward and the concepts of wanting and liking by using the attributes "I like", "I do not like" and "I want", "I do not want" (see Tibboel et al, 2015b for a detailed review). Although this task provides an implicit measure, in terms of underlying mechanisms it still requires high-level processing such as the semantic representation of the concepts of wanting and liking.…”

Quantifying social preference in young children using two tasks on a mobile platform

“…Importantly, both the preferential looking as well as the button task for measuring social reward responsivity were administered on an overlapping (50%) sample of children, making it possible to evaluate the divergent patterns of normative data on these two experimental measures and to test their inter-relationship. Dissociations in different aspects of reward processing have been reported for stimuli such as food or drugs, and these have been linked with atypical behaviour [43,44]. Questionnaire measures have pointed toward potential dissociation between reward processing components, as well as between self-report and behavioural measures of social reward responsivity in clinical population [45,46].…”