Recall of, and physical interaction with, self-owned items is privileged over items owned by other people (Constable et al, 2011;Cunningham et al, 2008). Here we investigate approach (towards the item), compared with avoidance (away from the item) movements to images of self-and experimenter-owned items. We asked if initiation time and movement duration of button-press approach responses to self-owned items are associated with a systematic self-bias (overall faster responses), compared with avoidance movements, similar to findings of paradigms investigating affective evaluation of (unowned) items.Participants were gifted mugs to use, and after a few days they completed an approachavoidance task (Chen & Bargh, 1999;Seibt et al, 2008;Truong et al, 2016) to images of their own or the Experimenter's mug, using either congruent or incongruent movement direction mappings. There was a self-bias effect for initiation time to the self-owned mug, for both congruent and incongruent mappings, and for movement duration in the congruent mapping. The effect was abolished in Experiment 2 when participants responded based on a shape on the handle rather than mug ownership. We speculate that ownership status requires conscious processing to modulate responses. Moreover, ownership status judgements and affective evaluation may employ different mechanisms.