ArticleEmotion (Washington, D.C.)2015
Why do fearful facial expressions elicit behavioral approach? Evidence from a combined approach-avoidance implicit association test.
Article in Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Kinematic encoding of the speed-accuracy trade-off in approach/avoidance decisions when facing social threats.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Emotions in motion: How fear and anger differently influence forward single-step initiation.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Depression in adolescence and young adulthood: the difficulty to integrate motivational/emotional systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- From Oxytocin to Compassion: The Saliency of Distress.Biology · 2023Article
- Trait anger and negative interpretation bias in neutral face perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Spontaneous instrumental avoidance learning in social contexts.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Stopping in (e)motion: Reactive action inhibition when facing valence-independent emotional stimuli.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Bilateral amygdala damage linked to impaired ability to predict others' fear but preserved moral judgements about causing others fear.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Only irrelevant angry, but not happy, expressions facilitate the response inhibition.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
- Mapping neural activity patterns to contextualized fearful facial expressions onto callous-unemotional (CU) traits: intersubject representational similarity analysis reveals less variation among high-CU adolescents.Personality neuroscience · 2020Article
- Amygdala-midbrain connectivity indicates a role for the mammalian parental care system in human altruism.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Emotion and personal space: Neural correlates of approach-avoidance tendencies to different facial expressions as a function of coldhearted psychopathic traits.Human brain mapping · 2017Article
- Feeling Happy and Sad at the Same Time? Subcultural Differences in Experiencing Mixed Emotions between Han Chinese and Mongolian Chinese.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- Fear and anger have opposite effects on risk seeking in the gain frame.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
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Abstract
Despite communicating a "negative" emotion, fearful facial expressions predominantly elicit behavioral approach from perceivers. It has been hypothesized that this seemingly paradoxical effect may occur due to fearful expressions' resemblance to vulnerable, infantile faces. However, this hypothesis has not yet been tested. We used a combined approach-avoidance/implicit association test (IAT) to test this hypothesis. Participants completed an approach-avoidance lever task during which they responded to fearful and angry facial expressions as well as neutral infant and adult faces presented in an IAT format. Results demonstrated an implicit association between fearful facial expressions and infant faces and showed that both fearful expressions and infant faces primarily elicit behavioral approach. The dominance of approach responses to both fearful expressions and infant faces decreased as a function of psychopathic personality traits. Results suggest that the prosocial responses to fearful expressions observed in most individuals may stem from their associations with infantile faces. (PsycINFO Database Record
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