Affective Congruency between Evaluative Stimulus and Forward-Backward Movements in Unintentional Approach-Avoidance Response
Fada Pan, Yanyan Zhang, Leyuan Li

Abstract
The present study aimed to investigate links between the direction of both left and right arm movements and affective words with the unintentional approach-avoidance response. According to previous studies, we proposed that even though participants do not have intentional approach or avoidance, the arm extension-positive and arm flexion-negative mapping will occur. We conducted a 2×2×2 experiment to ask participants to either move forward or backward to judge the valence of the emotional words with their left or right hand. The results suggested that moving arm forward (arm extension) facilitated responding to positive stimuli and moving arm backward (arm flexion) facilitated responding to negative stimuli, and this association happened similarly in left- and right-arm movement because of barely different motor fluency.

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