Common valence coding in action and evaluation: Affective blindness towards response-compatible stimuli

The structure of affective action representations: temporal binding of affective response codes

“…In other words, planning a ''positive'' action should impair the identification of positive stimuli, while planning a ''negative'' action should impair the identification of negative stimuli. Indeed, Eder and Klauer (Eder & Klauer, 2007) consistently observed this outcome pattern in several experiments: identifying affectively response-compatible stimuli was more difficult than identifying responseincompatible stimuli. This effect, referred to as actionvalence blindness, is even observed with responses that were affectively neutral originally but became extrinsically associated with a positive or negative meaning through task procedures (see also De Houwer, 2003).…”

“…It might thus not have been the planning of the (affectively laden) lever movement that was impaired by the planning of the button press, but the processing of the cue. Given that Eder and Klauer (2007) have provided evidence that planning an affective action impairs the identification of affectively congruent stimuli, this is a plausible alternative that would render our observation much less interesting than intended. To rule out this possibility, we conducted Experiment 2, where we avoided a confound between cue and action valence.…”

“…If action planning involves the binding of the codes that are representing its features, the \positive[ code would be integrated with other codes into the action plan and stay integrated until the planned action is executed. During that time, the \positive[ code would thus be less accessible and less available for other bindings, so that it should be difficult to fully represent other positive perceptual or action events before the action is carried out (Eder & Klauer, 2007, 2009.…”

Incongruency effects in affective processing: Automatic motivational counter-regulation or mismatch-induced salience?

“…According to this view, motivational states relating to success/failure or to positively/negatively defined goal states might constitute a kind of a perceptual context or background against which affectively mismatching stimuli tend to pop out whereas affectively congruent information tends to "sink in". Three different cognitive accounts have been proposed for the explanation of affective contrast effects, (a) the perceptual salience account (Klauer, Mierke, & Musch, 2003), (b) the affective blindness hypothesis (Eder & Klauer, 2007, and (c) the psychophysical account (Klauer, TeigeMocigemba, & Spruyt, 2009). …”

“…Since these hypotheses are purely cognitive in nature, they provide an alternative account of affective incongruency effects that is unrelated to motivational mechanisms. and Klauer (2007), Gawronski, Deutsch, and Seidel (2005, and by Klauer et al (2003Klauer et al ( , 2009) did not involve the manipulation of motivational variables, nor do the respective theories of mismatch-induced salience or affective blindness make an explicit reference to motivational states. In order to apply these purely cognitive explanations to the domain of motivational-affective incongruency effects, one has to assume that positive and negative motivational states (related to success/failure or to positively/negatively defined goal states)…”