A mobile approach-avoidance task.

Approach and avoidance tendencies have helped explain phenomena as diverse as addiction (Mogg, Field, & Bradley, 2005), phobia (Rinck & Becker, 2007), and intergroup discrimination (Bianchi, Carnaghi, & Shamloo, 2018; Degner, Essien, & Reichardt, 2016). When the original approach-avoidance task (AAT; Solarz, 1960) that measures these tendencies was redesigned to run on regular desktop computers, it made the task much more flexible but also sacrificed some important behavioral properties of the original task-most notably its reliance on physical distance change (Chen & Bargh, 1999). Here, we present a new, mobile version of the AAT that runs entirely on smartphones and combines the flexibility of modern tasks with the behavioral properties of the original AAT. In addition, it can easily be deployed in the field and, next to traditional reaction time measurements, includes the novel measurement of response force. In two studies, we demonstrate that the mobile AAT can reliably measure known approach-avoidance tendencies toward happy and angry faces both in the laboratory and in the field.

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts.

With a series of three studies, using an adapted dot-probe paradigm, we investigated the elicitation of spontaneous affective meaning. Although it is well established that humans show delays in disengaging their attention from conventional affective stimuli, it is unknown whether contextually acquired affective meaning similarly impacts attention. We examined attentional disengagement following pairs of neutral or slightly ambiguous words that in combination could evoke sex, violence or neutral associations. Study 1 demonstrated slower disengagement following words that conveyed sex or violence associations compared to words that conveyed neutral associations. This pattern was only present for participants who were aware of sex or violence associations. Study 2 replicated these results in a large sample, but only for sex associations. Study 3 replicated the effect while instructing participants explicitly to expect sex and violence associations. Finally, two control studies countered reasonable alternative explanations for our findings. Together, these studies show that contextually driven affective associations can arise quickly with the potential to influence attentional processes. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of emotion and language that highlight the importance of context in the generation of affective meaning.

Looking into the crystal ball of our emotional lives: emotion regulation and the overestimation of future guilt and shame.

In the present study, we examined the impact of emotion regulation on the intensity bias in guilt and shame. Fifty-two undergraduates either forecasted their emotions and emotion regulation following a guilt- and shame-eliciting situation or reported their actual experienced emotions and employed emotion regulation. Results showed a clear intensity bias, that is, forecasters predicted to experience more guilt and shame than experiencers actually experienced. Furthermore, results showed that forecasters predicted to employ less down-regulating emotion regulation (i.e. less acceptance) and more up-regulating emotion regulation (i.e. more rumination) than experiencers actually employed. Moreover, results showed that the intensity differences between forecasted and experienced guilt and shame could be explained (i.e. were mediated) by the differences between forecasted and actually employed emotion regulation (i.e. acceptance and rumination). These findings provide support for the hypothesis that the intensity bias can-at least in part-be explained by the misprediction of future emotion regulation.

Looking with different eyes: The psychological meaning of categorisation goals moderates facial reactivity to facial expressions.

In the present research we examined whether the psychological meaning of people's categorisation goals affects facial muscle activity in response to facial expressions of emotion. We had participants associate eye colour (blue, brown) with either a personality trait (extraversion) or a physical trait (light frequency) and asked them to use these associations in a speeded categorisation task of angry, disgusted, happy and neutral faces while assessing participants' response times and facial muscle activity. We predicted that participants would respond differentially to the emotional faces when the categorisation criteria allowed for inferences about a target's thoughts, feelings or behaviour (i.e., when categorising extraversion), but not when these lacked any social meaning (i.e., when categorising light frequency). Indeed, emotional faces triggered facial reactions to facial expressions when participants categorised extraversion, but not when they categorised light frequency. In line with this, only when categorising extraversion did participants' response times indicate a negativity bias replicating previous results. Together, these findings provide further evidence for the contextual nature of people's selective responses to the emotions expressed by others.

One way and the other: the bidirectional relationship between ambivalence and body movement.

Prior research exploring the relationship between evaluations and body movements has focused on one-sided evaluations. However, people regularly encounter objects or situations about which they simultaneously hold both positive and negative views, which results in the experience of ambivalence. Such experiences are often described in physical terms: For example, people say they are "wavering" between two sides of an issue or are "torn." Building on this observation, we designed two studies to explore the relationship between the experience of ambivalence and side-to-side movement, or wavering. In Study 1, we used a Wii Balance Board to measure movement and found that people who are experiencing ambivalence move from side to side more than people who are not experiencing ambivalence. In Study 2, we induced body movement to explore the reverse relationship and found that when people are made to move from side to side, their experiences of ambivalence are enhanced.

Gamma flicker elicits positive affect without awareness.

High-frequency oscillations emerged as a neural code for both positive affect and fluent attentional processing from evolutionary simulations with artificial neural networks. Visual 50 Hz flicker, which entrains neural oscillations in the gamma band, has been shown to foster attentional switching, but can it also elicit positive affect? A three-faces display (2-female/1-male or 2-male/1-female) was preceded by a 50, 25, or 0 Hz flicker on the position of the odd-one-out (i.e., the target). Participants decided on the gender (Block 1) or on the subjective valence (Block 2) of this neutral target in an approach-avoidance task, which served as an implicit affective measure. Only the detection of 25 Hz flicker, but not of 50 Hz flicker, was above chance (Block 3). Faces primed by invisible 50 Hz flicker were explicitly evaluated more positively than with 25 Hz or 0 Hz. This gamma flicker also facilitated approach reactions, and inhibited avoidance reactions relative to 25 Hz and 0 Hz flicker in Blocks 1 and 2. Attentional switching was, moreover, enhanced by the 50 Hz flicker. According to the Affect-Gamma hypothesis, also in biological neural networks, high-frequency gamma oscillations may code for positive affect.

An Audience Facilitates Facial Feedback: A Social-Context Hypothesis Reconciling Original Study and Nonreplication.

Nonreplications of previously undisputed phenomena tend to leave a theoretical vacuum. This theoretical perspective seeks to fill the gap left by the failure to replicate unobtrusive facial feedback. In the emblematic original study, participants who held a pen between the teeth (i.e., requiring activity of the zygomaticus major muscle) rated cartoons more positively than participants who held the pen between the lips. We argue that the same social mechanisms (e.g., the presence of an audience) modulate facial feedback to emotion as are involved in the feed-forward shaping of facial actions by emotions. Differing social contexts could thus help explain the contrast between original findings and failures to obtain unobtrusive facial feedback. An exploratory analysis that included results only from (unobtrusive) facial-feedback studies without explicit reference to emotion in the facial manipulation provided preliminary support for this hypothesis. Studies with a social context (e.g., due to experimenter presence) showed a medium-sized aggregate facial-feedback effect, whereas studies without a social context (e.g., when facial actions were only filmed), revealed a small effect. Video awareness strengthened facial feedback considerably within an engaging social context, but seemed to reduce it without a social context. We provisionally conclude that a (pro-)social interpretation of facial actions facilitates feedback to (primarily positive) emotion, and suggest further research explicitly manipulating this context.

Mental states inside out: switching costs for emotional and nonemotional sentences that differ in internal and external focus.

Mental states-such as thinking, remembering, or feeling angry, happy, or dizzy-have a clear internal component. We feel a certain way when we are in these states. These internal experiences may be simulated when people understand conceptual references to mental states. However, mental states can also be described from an "external" perspective, for example when referring to "smiling." In those cases, simulation of visible outside features may be more relevant for understanding. In a switching costs paradigm, we presented semantically unrelated sentences describing emotional and nonemotional mental states while manipulating their internal or external focus. The results show that switching costs occur when participants shift between sentences with an internal and an external focus. This suggests that different forms of simulation underlie understanding these sentences. In addition, these effects occurred for emotional and nonemotional mental states, suggesting that they are grounded in a similar way-through the process of simulation.

Experimentally induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception.

The effects of emotion on time perception are elusive: depending on the intensity, valence and arousal of the situation, implicit and explicit time perception seems to slow down or speed up. Awe is a strong and powerful positive emotion that is typically elicited in response to vast stimuli and therefore inducing awe may be optimally suited for studying the relationship between emotion and time perception. In two studies we investigated whether the experience of awe would result in an expanded perception of time. Participants watched awe-eliciting, positive and neutral videos and simultaneously conducted a temporal bisection task, in which they classified vibrotactile stimuli as short or long. As expected awe videos elicited stronger feelings of awe than positive and control videos, while they were matched with positive videos in terms of subjective valence and arousal. However across both studies we did not find consistent effects of awe on implicit and retrospective time perception. Only in the first study, stronger subjective feelings of awe were associated with an increased dilation of time perception. The current findings indicate that lab-induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception and we suggest that more ecologically valid ways to induce awe may be required in future studies.

The effects of cortisol administration on approach-avoidance behavior: an event-related potential study.

We investigated the effects of cortisol administration (50 mg) on approach and avoidance tendencies in low and high trait avoidant healthy young men. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured during a reaction time task, in which participants evaluated the emotional expression of photographs of happy and angry faces by making an approaching (flexion) or avoiding (extension) arm movement. The task consisted of an affect-congruent (approach happy faces and avoid angry faces) and an affect-incongruent (reversed instruction) condition. Behavioral and ERP analyses showed that cortisol enhanced congruency effects for angry faces in highly avoidant individuals only. The ERP effects involved an increase of both early (P150) and late (P3) positive amplitudes, indicative of increased processing of the angry faces in high avoidant subjects after cortisol administration. Together, these results suggest a context-specific effect of cortisol on processing of, and adaptive responses to, motivationally significant threat stimuli, particularly in participants highly sensitive to threat signals.

Shared states: using MVPA to test neural overlap between self-focused emotion imagery and other-focused emotion understanding.

The present study tested whether the neural patterns that support imagining 'performing an action', 'feeling a bodily sensation' or 'being in a situation' are directly involved in understanding other people's actions, bodily sensations and situations. Subjects imagined the content of short sentences describing emotional actions, interoceptive sensations and situations (self-focused task), and processed scenes and focused on how the target person was expressing an emotion, what this person was feeling, and why this person was feeling an emotion (other-focused task). Using a linear support vector machine classifier on brain-wide multi-voxel patterns, we accurately decoded each individual class in the self-focused task. When generalizing the classifier from the self-focused task to the other-focused task, we also accurately decoded whether subjects focused on the emotional actions, interoceptive sensations and situations of others. These results show that the neural patterns that underlie self-imagined experience are involved in understanding the experience of other people. This supports the theoretical assumption that the basic components of emotion experience and understanding share resources in the brain.

Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat.

People derive their sense of belonging from perceptions of being a moral person. Research moreover suggests that social cues of rejection rapidly influence visual scanning, and result in avoidant gaze behavior, especially in socially anxious individuals. With the current eye-tracking experiment, we therefore examined whether moral integrity threats and affirmations influence selective avoidance of social threat, and how this varies with individual differences in social anxiety. Fifty-nine participants retrieved a memory of a past immoral, moral, or neutral act. Next, participants passively viewed angry, happy, and neutral faces, while we recorded how often they first fixated on the eyes. In addition, we administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (1987). Participants first fixated less on angry eyes compared to happy or neutral eyes when their moral integrity was threatened, and this selective avoidance was enhanced with increasing social anxiety. Following a moral affirmation, however, participants no longer selectively avoided the eyes of angry faces, regardless of individual differences in social anxiety. The results thus suggest that both low and high socially anxious people adjust their social gaze behavior in response to threats and affirmations of their moral integrity, pointing to the importance of the social context when considering affective processing biases.

Easy moves: Perceptual fluency facilitates approach-related action.

It is well established that processing fluency impacts preference judgments and physiological reactions indicative of affect. Yet, little is known about how fluency influences motivation-related action. Here, we offer a novel demonstration that fluency facilitates action-tendencies related to approach. Four experiments investigated this action effect, its boundary conditions, and concomitant affective responses. Experiment 1 found faster approach movements (reaction times [RTs] to initiate arm flexion) to perceptually fluent stimuli when participants acted to rapidly classify stimuli as either "good" or "bad." Experiment 2 eliminated this fluency effect on action when participants performed nonaffective classifications ("living" or "nonliving"), even though fluency robustly enhanced liking judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrated that fluency can also facilitate approach action that is not immediate, as long as the delayed action involves affective classification. This experiment also found that fluent stimuli elicit genuine hedonic responses, as reflected in facial electromyography (fEMG) activity over zygomaticus "smiling" muscle. Experiment 4 replicated the physiological (fEMG) evidence for hedonic responses to fluent stimuli, but similar to Experiment 2, we observed no fluency effects on actions involving nonaffective classification. The current studies offer the first evidence that perceptual fluency can facilitate approach-related movements, when such movements are embedded in the context of affective decisions. Generally, these results suggest that variations in processing dynamics can flexibly and implicitly shape action-tendencies. (PsycINFO Database Record

The effects of stress-induced cortisol responses on approach-avoidance behavior.

High glucocorticoid stress-responses are associated with prolonged freezing reactions and decreased active approach and avoidance behavior in animals. The present study was designed to investigate the effects of cortisol responses and trait avoidance on approach-avoidance behavior in humans. Twenty individuals were administered a computerized approach-avoidance (AA)-task before and after stress-induction (Trier Social Stress Test). The AA-task involved a reaction time (RT) task, in which participants made affect congruent and affect incongruent arm movements towards positive and threatening social stimuli. Affect congruent responses involved arm extension (avoidance) in response to angry faces and arm flexion (approach) in response to happy faces. Reversed responses were made in affect incongruent instruction conditions. As expected, participants with high cortisol responses showed significantly decreased RT congruency-effects in a context of social stress. Low trait avoidance was also associated with diminished congruency-effects during stress. However, the latter effect disappeared after controlling for the effects of cortisol. In sum, in agreement with animal research, these data suggest that high cortisol responses are associated with a decrease in active approach-avoidance behavior during stress. These findings may have important implications for the study of freezing and avoidance reactions in patients with anxiety disorders, such as social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Affective modulation of recognition bias.

A correspondence of processing on the familiarity-novelty and positive-negative dimensions, particularly in the earliest processing stages, is proposed. Familiarity manipulations should, therefore, not only influence affective evaluations (e.g., the mere exposure effect), but affective manipulations should also bias familiarity judgments (e.g., in recognition). In Experiment 1, both previously presented and new recognition test words were primed by matching, nonmatching, positive, or negative context words. In Experiment 2, more diffuse affective states were induced during recognition test trials by contracting facial muscles that corresponded to positive and negative expressions. Particularly when participants were less aware of the familiarity and affective manipulations, corresponding effects were found. Positive affect led to a more liberal recognition bias, and negative affect led to more cautious tendencies.

The path of ambivalence: tracing the pull of opposing evaluations using mouse trajectories.

Ambivalence refers to a psychological conflict between opposing evaluations, often experienced as being torn between alternatives. This dynamic aspect of ambivalence is hard to capture with outcome-focused measures, such as response times or self-report. To gain more insight into ambivalence as it unfolds, the current work uses an embodied measure of pull, drawing on research in dynamic systems. In three studies, using different materials, we tracked people's mouse movements as they chose between negative and positive evaluations of attitude objects. When participants evaluated ambivalent attitude objects, their mouse trajectories showed more pull of the non-chosen evaluative option than when they evaluated univalent attitude objects, revealing that participants were literally torn between the two opposing evaluations. We address the relationship of this dynamic measure to response time and self-reports of ambivalence and discuss implications and avenues for future research.

On the automatic link between affect and tendencies to approach and avoid: Chen and Bargh (1999) revisited.

Within the literature on emotion and behavioral action, studies on approach-avoidance take up a prominent place. Several experimental paradigms feature successful conceptual replications but many original studies have not yet been replicated directly. We present such a direct replication attempt of two seminal experiments originally conducted by Chen and Bargh (1999). In their first experiment, participants affectively evaluated attitude objects by pulling or pushing a lever. Participants who had to pull the lever with positively valenced attitude objects and push the lever with negatively valenced attitude objects (i.e., congruent instruction) did so faster than participants who had to follow the reverse (i.e., incongruent) instruction. In Chen and Bargh's second experiment, the explicit evaluative instructions were absent and participants merely responded to the attitude objects by either always pushing or always pulling the lever. Similar results were obtained as in Experiment 1. Based on these findings, Chen and Bargh concluded that (1) attitude objects are evaluated automatically; and (2) attitude objects automatically trigger a behavioral tendency to approach or avoid. We attempted to replicate both experiments and failed to find the effects reported by Chen and Bargh as indicated by our pre-registered Bayesian data analyses; nevertheless, the evidence in favor of the null hypotheses was only anecdotal, and definitive conclusions await further study.

Turning the hands of time again: a purely confirmatory replication study and a Bayesian analysis.

In a series of four experiments, Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012) found support for the conjecture that clockwise movements induce psychological states of temporal progression and an orientation toward the future and novelty. Here we report the results of a preregistered replication attempt of Experiment 2 from Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012). Participants turned kitchen rolls either clockwise or counterclockwise while answering items from a questionnaire assessing openness to experience. Data from 102 participants showed that the effect went slightly in the direction opposite to that predicted by Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012), and a preregistered Bayes factor hypothesis test revealed that the data were 10.76 times more likely under the null hypothesis than under the alternative hypothesis. Our findings illustrate the theoretical importance and practical advantages of preregistered Bayes factor replication studies, both for psychological science and for empirical work in general.

Automatic affective evaluation does not automatically predispose for arm flexion and extension.

Affect may have the function of preparing organisms for action, enabling approach and avoidance behavior. M. Chen and J. A. Bargh (1999) suggested that affective processing automatically resulted in action tendencies for arm flexion and extension. The crucial question is, however, whether automaticity of evaluation was actually achieved or whether their results were due to nonautomatic, conscious processing. When faces with emotional expressions were evaluated consciously, similar effects were obtained as in the M. Chen and J. A. Bargh study. When conscious evaluation was reduced, however, no action tendencies were observed, whereas affective processing of the faces was still evident from affective priming effects. The results suggest that tendencies for arm flexion and extension are not automatic consequences of automatic affective information processing.

Loading working memory enhances affective priming.

Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy, neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.