Commentary: Contrasting motivational orientation and evaluative coding accounts: on the need to differentiate the effectors of approach/avoidance responses.

Andreas B Eder,Klaus Rothermund,Bernhard Hommel

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00163

Abstract

Commentary: Contrasting motivational orientation and evaluative coding accounts: on the need to differentiate the effectors of approach/avoidance responses.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
A commentary on Contrasting motivational orientation and evaluative coding accounts: on the need to differentiate the effectors of approach/avoidance responses by Kozlik, J., Neumann, R., and Lozo, L. (2015)
In a recent review paper on theoretical explanations of affective stimulus-response compatibility effects between positive/negative stimuli and approach/avoidance-related movements, Kozlik et al (2015; KNL) argue that an evaluative-coding approach cannot fully account for aSRC effects with facial actions and that motivational orientations provide a better explanation. Their arguments are based on three observations that they consider incompatible with an evaluativecoding approach (Eder and Rothermund, 2008, ER) and the Theory of Event Coding (TEC; Hommel et al, 2001) from which the approach is derived: (1) attempts to dissociate evaluative coding and motivational orientation showed separable contributions from these two factors (Krieglmeyer et al, 2010); (2) aSRC can be changed in manual actions but hardly in facial actions (Neumann et al, 2014); and (3) the hemispheric asymmetry in the control of positive/negative facial expressions matches the hemispheric asymmetry assumed for motivational orientations (Davidson et al, 1990)

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. A commentary on Contrasting motivational orientation and evaluative coding accounts: on the need to differentiate the effectors of approach/avoidance responses by Kozlik, J., Neumann, R., and Lozo, L.

Results

Conclusion