Food rewards elicit affective responses that emerge from multiple components.

These components are known to rely on distinct neurobiological substrates.

We offer a framework distinguishing elicitation- and response-based reward processes.

Affective relevance may be a key elicitation mechanism of food-seeking behaviors.

This approach may foster understanding of food-valuation neuropsychological processes.

Food rewards elicit a variety of affective responses. They emerge from multiple components, including motivational and hedonic processes. Here, we review evidence for these multiple components through an affective science lens. We describe recent advances showing that the motivational and hedonic components are modulated by dopamine and opioids in different ways, involve distinct subregions of the ventral striatum, and are decoupled in addiction. Building on the conceptual links between the food-reward components and appraisal processes in emotion, we propose a multicomponential framework distinguishing between elicitation- and response-based affective-reward processes and suggest that affective relevance could be a key determinant in the elicitation of food-seeking behaviors. We outline how this framework can help identify the psychological and neural processes implicated in affective responses relying on different properties of food rewards and examine the effects of executive control thereon. Altogether, a multicomponential approach to food rewards may contribute a better mechanistic understanding of eating behaviors and affective valuation of food.

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.