Dissociation between wanting and liking for coffee in heavy drinkers.

BACKGROUND: There is an ongoing discussion about the addictive strength of caffeine. According to the incentive-sensitization theory, the development and the maintenance of drug addiction is the result of a selective sensitization of brain regions that are relevant for wanting without a corresponding increase in liking. Dissociations of wanting and liking have been observed with a wide range of drugs in animals. For human subjects, results are inconclusive, which is possibly due to invalid operationalizations of wanting and liking. AIM: The present study examined dissociations of wanting and liking for coffee in heavy and low/non-consumers with newly developed and validated response time-based assessment procedures for wanting and liking. METHODS: For this study 24 heavy and 32 low/non-consumers of coffee completed two versions of the Implicit-Association Test (IAT), one of which has been developed and validated recently to assess wanting for coffee, whereas the other reflects an indicator of liking for coffee. RESULTS: Results revealed a significant interaction between group (heavy vs. low/non-consumers) and IAT type (wanting vs. liking) indicating that heavy coffee drinkers differed from low/non-consumers by displaying increased wanting but not liking for coffee. INTERPRETATION: These data confirm that heavy coffee consumption is associated with strong wanting despite low liking for coffee, indicating that wanting becomes independent from liking through repeated consumption of caffeine. This dissociation provides a possible explanation for the widespread and stable consumption of caffeine-containing beverages.

The Trust Game for Couples (TGC): A new standardized paradigm to assess trust in romantic relationships.

Trust between couples is a prerequisite for stable and satisfactory romantic relationships. However, there has been no valid research tool to assess partner-specific trust behavior including costly investments in the trustworthiness of the romantic partner. We here present a comprehensive validation of the newly developed Trust Game for Couples (TGC) by means of various self-report and implicit relationship-related measures. The TGC operationalizes trust by measuring an individual's willingness to invest his or her own financial resources in pro-relationship attitudes of their romantic partner (collected by dichotomous responses to relationship-relevant items, e.g., answering yes to "I am absolutely sure that I love my partner"). Thirty-five healthy couples between 20 and 34 years completed the TGC in an interactive (both partners present), but anonymous setting (no information on the partner's responses revealed). Trust, as measured by the TGC, correlates positively with self-reported trust, satisfaction, and felt closeness in the relationship, but not with general interpersonal trust, confirming both its convergent and discriminant validity. In addition to explicit criteria for construct validity, implicit measures of partner valence and confidence explained variance in the TGC, demonstrating that it constitutes an economical measure of implicit and explicit ingredients of trust between couples. In sum, the TGC provides a novel, specific behavioral tool for a sensitive assessment of trust in dyadic relationships with potential for numerous research fields.

Implicit 'wanting' without implicit 'liking': A test of incentive-sensitization-theory in the context of smoking addiction using the wanting-implicit-association-test (W-IAT).

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: According to incentive-sensitization theory (IST), addiction is characterized by the decoupling of two subconsciously operating psychological processes 'wanting' (i.e., incentive salience) and 'liking' (i.e., sensory pleasure). The present study set out to test predictions derived from IST in the context of smoking addiction with two variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT): a Liking-IAT and a Wanting-IAT. In line with IST, we hypothesized that smokers differ from nonsmokers with regard to 'wanting' but not 'liking'. METHODS: Smokers (n = 24) and nonsmokers (n = 24) completed a Liking-IAT (L-IAT) and a Wanting-IAT (W-IAT) to assess their implicit 'liking' and 'wanting' for smoking-cues. Smokers completed these measures twice: once immediately after smoking, and once after a 12 h period of abstinence. RESULTS: While nonsmokers exhibited negative scores on both IATs that were highly correlated, smokers' W-IAT scores were significantly more positive than and uncorrelated with their L-IAT scores. In line with the notion of chronically increased 'wanting' in addicted individuals, smokers' W-IAT scores were unaffected by the deprivation manipulation. LIMITATIONS: Results were obtained on a non-clinical sample. Compliance with abstinence instructions was assessed solely via self-report. CONCLUSION: Results obtained in this study support the assumption that nicotine addiction is linked to a dissociation of 'wanting' and 'liking' for smoking as postulated by IST. Furthermore, the study provides further evidence that the newly developed W-IAT-is a valid measure of implicit 'wanting' that can be used to examine the processes that underlie human reward seeking behavior.

Predicting Behavior With Implicit Measures: Disillusioning Findings, Reasonable Explanations, and Sophisticated Solutions.

Two decades ago, the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) sparked enthusiastic reactions. With implicit measures like the IAT, researchers hoped to finally be able to bridge the gap between self-reported attitudes on one hand and behavior on the other. Twenty years of research and several meta-analyses later, however, we have to conclude that neither the IAT nor its derivatives have fulfilled these expectations. Their predictive value for behavioral criteria is weak and their incremental validity over and above self-report measures is negligible. In our review, we present an overview of explanations for these unsatisfactory findings and delineate promising ways forward. Over the years, several reasons for the IAT's weak predictive validity have been proposed. They point to four potentially problematic features: First, the IAT is by no means a pure measure of individual differences in associations but suffers from extraneous influences like recoding. Hence, the predictive validity of IAT-scores should not be confused with the predictive validity of associations. Second, with the IAT, we usually aim to measure evaluation ("liking") instead of motivation ("wanting"). Yet, behavior might be determined much more often by the latter than the former. Third, the IAT focuses on measuring associations instead of propositional beliefs and thus taps into a construct that might be too unspecific to account for behavior. Finally, studies on predictive validity are often characterized by a mismatch between predictor and criterion (e.g., while behavior is highly context-specific, the IAT usually takes into account neither the situation nor the domain). Recent research, however, also revealed advances addressing each of these problems, namely (1) procedural and analytical advances to control for recoding in the IAT, (2) measurement procedures to assess implicit wanting, (3) measurement procedures to assess implicit beliefs, and (4) approaches to increase the fit between implicit measures and behavioral criteria (e.g., by incorporating contextual information). Implicit measures like the IAT hold an enormous potential. In order to allow them to fulfill this potential, however, we have to refine our understanding of these measures, and we should incorporate recent conceptual and methodological advancements. This review provides specific recommendations on how to do so.

Dissociating implicit wanting from implicit liking: Development and validation of the Wanting Implicit Association Test (W-IAT).

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Wanting and liking reflect different phenomena that can be dissociated. In the present research, we develop and validate an implicit measure of wanting, the Wanting Implicit Association Test (W-IAT). To examine the validity of the W-IAT, we compared it with a standard liking IAT (L-IAT) and a semantic pseudo-wanting IAT (PW-IAT) in a context where wanting-liking dissociations have been established by previous research. Specifically, we predicted that heterosexual male participants prefer attractive female over attractive male faces in the new wanting IAT, whereas no such asymmetry should be obtained for the liking and pseudo-wanting IATs. METHODS: The rationale of the W-IAT consists in endowing one of the two attribute responses in the IAT with a truly motivational wanting quality, which allows assessment of stimulus-response compatibility effects between target stimuli and responses that are based on motivational wanting. To establish the motivational quality of the wanting response, participants are made thirsty with salty snacks before the test. During the W-IAT, participants obtain water as an action effect of the response with which they categorize drinks into the attribute category "I want". As target stimuli for which the strength of implicit wanting was to be assessed in the IAT, attractive and unattractive male and female faces had to be classified on the basis of their attractiveness. RESULTS: In the W-IAT, participants (heterosexual and male) showed a stronger implicit preference for attractive female over attractive male faces. No such difference was found for implicit liking (assessed with a standard valence IAT) and for the pseudo-wanting IAT (using only semantic labels of wanting and not wanting). LIMITATIONS: Future research is needed to validate the W-IAT in other motivational contexts besides attractive faces (e.g., addiction, craving) and to identify the elements of the procedure that are critical for establishing an implicit measure of wanting. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that the W-IAT is a valid measure of implicit wanting.