Speaker
Description
Affective facial expressions are known to bias approach-avoidance tendencies. Yet in real social interactions, the affective outcomes of approaching or avoiding others are just as relevant as the emotional cues that initially bias these actions. This raises the question of whether anticipating those social-affective consequences plays a role in shaping approach-avoidance responses.
To investigate this, we combined the response-effect compatibility paradigm with the manikin task, in which participants were instructed to approach or avoid individuals with neutral expressions. Crucially, we manipulated the mapping of each response to its affective outcome across blocks by dynamically changing the expression to either happy or angry following the response. This rendered the outcomes of approach and avoidance predictable and allowed us to test whether the anticipation of an affective consequence influences action tendencies toward social stimuli, even when the stimuli themselves carry no emotional valence initially.
Overall, approach responses toward social stimuli were faster, aligning with previous findings suggesting that positive evaluations are facilitated when stimuli are social in nature. More importantly, there was a significant interaction between action type and anticipated affective outcome. Avoidance responses were faster when the anticipated consequence was an angry facial expression, while approach responses were facilitated when the anticipated outcome was a happy expression. These findings demonstrate that the cognitive representation of affective action outcomes can be as powerful as affective stimuli in biasing approach-avoidance behavior, challenging the traditional view that affective responses are mainly driven by stimulus valence.
