Evidence for the automatic evaluation of self-generated actions

Evaluative priming reveals dissociable effects of cognitive versus physiological anxiety on action monitoring.

“…To this aim, in Experiment 2, we induced worry by means of an anagram task, while worry was treated as a trait variable in Experiment 1. The results of these two experiments replicate the findings previously put forward by Aarts et al (2012Aarts et al ( , 2013. More specifically, in these two experiments, we found evidence for a significant interaction effect at the group level between the putative affective value of the action (correct/positive vs. incorrect/negative) and the valence of the subsequent emotional word (positive vs. negative).…”

“…Accuracy and RTs (for correct responses) were analyzed separately using a repeated measures ANOVA with (i) the valence of the target word (either positive or negative) and (ii) the type of action (False Alarms and Fast Hits) preceding word presentation as within-subject factors. We did not include in these analyses trials corresponding to Slow Hits because this action type did not lead to any significant and consistent evaluative priming effect in previous studies (Aarts et al, 2012(Aarts et al, , 2013, nor in the present one, t < 1.This may be due to the fact that the putative valence of slow hits (unlike either Fast Hits or False Alarms) was somehow ambivalent in the sense that a slow hit was a correct action in absolute terms but performed too slowly relative to the arbitrary response deadline (hence probably carrying also a negative connotation). Even though the dichotomy between Fast Hits and Slow Hits could appear somewhat arbitrary at first sight, earlier studies using the same speeded Go/noGo task already showed that these two trial types elicited different neurophysiological effects (at the CRN level specifically) and could be dissociated from one another (see Vocat et al, 2008;Aarts et al, 2013).…”

“…Accuracy and RTs for correct responses (i.e., correct presses on Go trials) were analyzed using ANOVAs as a function of (i) the valence of the face Relationship between Components of Anxiety and Evaluative Priming Effect. In order to determine whether the evaluative priming effect was influenced by anxiety (and more specifically whether either worry or arousal, or perhaps both components played a role), the priming effect for actions was calculated as follows: the magnitude of the evaluative priming was calculated as the RT difference between incongruent action-word pairs (i.e., False Alarms/positive and Fast Hits/negative) and congruent action-word pairs (i.e., False Alarms/negative and Fast Hits/positive) (see also Aarts et al, 2012 for a similar procedure). In the case of faces, congruent face-word pairs (i.e., negative face -negative word and positive face -positive word) were subtracted from incongruent face-word pairs (i.e., negative face -positive word and positive face -negative word).…”

“…Likewise, worry and arousal were also entered as main (and concurrent) predictors in the regression model used for the evaluative priming effect obtained for emotional faces. (Aarts et al, 2012(Aarts et al, , 2013.…”

“…On the other hand, Mogg, Weinman, and Mathews (1987) suggest with their vigilance avoidance hypothesis that in order to avoid accurate evaluation of aversive events or habituation of them, anxious individuals first have the tendency to quickly identify potentially threatening events. Interestingly, this explanation might potentially explain why higher levels of anxiety were eventually associated with a weaker action-based evaluative priming effect (Aarts et al, 2012). More specifically, if individuals with 7 high levels of anxiety are faster in identifying threatening events, it is possible that for them response errors (prime, which are negatively connoted) are processed differentially or to a larger extent than participants with a lower level of trait anxiety, hindering in turn the processing of the subsequent target stimulus (i.e., emotional word) and decreasing priming between these two events.…”