Generalized Approach/Avoidance Responses to Degraded Affective Stimuli: An Informational Account

Two studies tested whether affective stimuli presented auditorily spontaneously trigger approach/avoidance reactions toward neutral visual stimuli. Contrary to hypotheses, Experiment 1 revealed that when the target was present, participants responded faster after positive (vs. negative) stimuli, and faster to the absence of the target following negative (vs. positive) stimuli, whatever the response modality (i.e., approach/avoidance). Instructions were to approach/avoid stimuli depending on whether a target was presented or not presented. We proposed that affective stimuli were used in this study as information about the presence/absence of the target. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1 when participants responded to the presence/absence of the target, whereas an approach/avoidance compatibility effect was observed when each response modality was associated with a target. These results indicate that affective stimuli influence approach/avoidance across perceptual modalities and suggest that the link between affective stimuli and behavioral tendencies could be mediated by informational value of affect.