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Directive and incentive functions of affective action consequences: an ideomotor approach

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Abstract

Five experiments examined whether affective consequences become associated with the responses producing them and whether anticipations of positive and negative action outcomes influence action control differently. In a learning phase, one response produced pleasant and another response unpleasant visual effects. In a subsequent test phase, the same actions were carried out in response to a neutral feature of affective stimuli. Results showed that responses were faster when the irrelevant valence of the response cue matched the valence of the response outcome, but only when the responses still produced outcomes. These results suggest that affective action consequences have a directive function in that they facilitate the selection of the associated response over other responses, even when the response outcome is unpleasant (Experiment 4A). Results of another experiment showed that affective action consequences can also have an incentive function in that responses with pleasant outcomes are generally facilitated relative to responses with unpleasant outcomes. However, this motivational effect was seen only in a free-choice test (Experiment 5). The results suggest that behavioral impulses induced by ideomotor processes are constrained by the motivational evaluation of the anticipated action outcome. A model that integrates motivational factors into ideomotor theory is presented.

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Notes

  1. This timing of the response was introduced in order to prepare the participant for the test phase in which instructions were to respond not before the response cue has disappeared from the screen.

  2. Note that the probability of a lucky guess was p = 0.25 (i.e., one out of four possible R–O combinations). Thus, knowledge of the R–O contingency was above chance but far from perfect, which is not too surprising given that the affective outcomes in the present experiments were subtle and task irrelevant.

  3. Statistical power was however insufficient to detect a small effect (f = 0.10; p = 0.21). Thus, our experiments cannot rule out the possibility that a weak influence of contingency awareness was not detected. Note, however, that the assumption of a small effect is unwarranted if it is assumed that contingency awareness mediates the learning-effect in an all-or-none fashion.

  4. Unfortunately, the number of correct responses during task practice was too low for a meaningful analysis (about 33 % of the responses in these trials were incorrect).

  5. Emotion research has shown that viewing unpleasant IAPS-pictures prompts defensive activation even when these pictures signal safety from a painful shock (Bradley, Moulder, & Lang, 2005). Given this evidence, it is unlikely that feedback of a correct response can completely override the intrinsic unpleasantness of these stimuli.

  6. A reactivation of learned affective action consequences fits well with Damasio’s (1994) concept of a “somatic marker” that provides a gut feeling on the merits of a given response.

  7. It should be noted that the extinction of a behavioral response does not necessarily imply an extinction of the underlying associative structure that governs the instrumental response. In fact, there is strong evidence that a response-outcome association is preserved even when the overt response is not displayed anymore in an extinction test (Rescorla, 1993; see also a reinstatement of extinguished fear responses in human aversive conditioning; Hermans et al., 2005).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to Andreas B. Eder (ED 201/2-1), of the Netherlands Research Organization (NWO) to Bernhard Hommel (433-09-243), and a Methusalem Grant of Ghent University to Jan De Houwer (BOF09/01M00209).

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Eder, A.B., Rothermund, K., De Houwer, J. et al. Directive and incentive functions of affective action consequences: an ideomotor approach. Psychological Research 79, 630–649 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0590-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0590-4

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