The Time Process And Mechanism Of Approach-avoidance Motivation Processing In Emotional And Non-emotional Situations

Approach and avoidance motivation is critical to organism。Approach motivation system and the avoidance motivation system is out of balance,it will cause mental illness such as anxiety,depression and so on.The relationship between emotion and motivation has been the focus of research,and the motivation direction of anger has been debated,some researches showed that anger trigger approach motivation,however,other researches revealed that anger trigger avoidance motivation.How about the relationship between emotion and motivation,and what factors affect emotional motivational responses? Beyond the relationship between the motivation and emotion,some researches found that approach motivation significantly faster than avoidance motivation in the absence of emotional context.Therefore,later researches add the neutral condition as the baseline.However,few people explored the cause and neural mechanism of the phenomenon.Current study used behavioral experiment and event related potential(ERP)to explore the relationship between motivation and emotion and the neural mechanism of approach-avoidance motivation.Study 1 used the classic approach-avoidance task(AAT)to explore the relationship between emotion and motivation,especially the motivational direction of anger,and added time and identity factors to explore their impact to the motivation.Experimental materials are happy,angry and fear facial expression,identities involved self and stranger,time factor means separated experiment into two parts according the time.Current studies contained three sub-experiments,per experiment used two emotional materials.Results showed that approach and avoidance reactions are elicited by the evaluative connotation of the emotion if the two emotions of different evaluative connotation are presented together in a task,positive emotion elicited approach motivation,negative emotion elicited avoidance motivation.Happy expression trigger approach motivation and angry expression trigger avoidance motivation in the sub-study 1.Happy expression trigger approach motivation and fear expression trigger avoidance motivation in the sub-study 3.Approach and avoidance reactions are elicited by the social meaning of the emotion if the two emotions of same evaluative connotation are presented together in a task.In the sub-study 2,negative emotion anger paired negative emotion fear,fear has a threating function that activate an avoidance reaction,anger elicit approach reaction which is adaptive in overcoming the social challenge signaled by the expression.Regardless the type of the emotional stimulus,the degree of avoidance motivation which it causes will diminish over time,and the approach motivation not change.Different identities have no effect on emotional motivation.Study 2 used ERP explored the cause and neural mechanism of approach motivation faster avoidance motivation in the absence of emotional context.Experimental paradigm also is the classic approach-avoidance task,experimental materials are the grating without the emotional message(two kinds of grating with different inclination angle).We first separated motivation process into two stages: the generation stage of motivation and the translation stage from motivation to action.Results showed that the difference between approach reaction and avoidance reaction disappeared when the generation stage of motivation was separated from motivation process.It indicated that approach reaction faster than avoidance reaction in the generation stage of motivation.The results of ERP showed that approach motivation elicited larger N1 amplitude than avoidance motivation in the generation stage of motivation.Past researches showed that N1 amplitude related to attentional scope.For further verify this conjecture,we make the experiment 5.Experiment 5 modified the classic experimental paradigm,designing the broaden attentional scope condition and the narrowed attentional scope condition.Results showed that under the condition of narrowed attentional scope both the approach reaction and the avoidance reaction were accelerated,however,the narrowed attentional scope significantly speed the approach reaction than the avoidance reaction.The results supported the conclusion of the experiment 4,which indicated that approach reaction faster than the avoidance reaction because the approach motivation narrowed the attentional scope.