The effects of induced positive and negative affect on Pavlovian-instrumental interactions

ABSTRACT

Across species, animals have an intrinsic drive to approach appetitive stimuli and to withdraw from aversive stimuli. In affective science, influential theories of emotion link positive affect with strengthened behavioural approach and negative affect with avoidance. Based on these theories, we predicted that individuals’ positive and negative affect levels should particularly influence their behaviour when innate Pavlovian approach/avoidance tendencies conflict with learned instrumental behaviours. Here, across two experiments – exploratory Experiment 1 (N = 91) and a preregistered confirmatory Experiment 2 (N = 335) – we assessed how induced positive and negative affect influenced Pavlovian-instrumental interactions in a reward/punishment Go/No-Go task. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no evidence for a main effect of positive/negative affect on either approach/avoidance behaviour or Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. However, we did find evidence that the effects of induced affect on behaviour were moderated by individual differences in self-reported behavioural inhibition and gender. Exploratory computational modelling analyses explained these demographic moderating effects as arising from positive correlations between demographic factors and individual differences in the strength of Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. These findings serve to sharpen our understanding of the effects of positive and negative affect on instrumental behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Reinforcement learning
• experimental affect induction
• computational modelling
• Pavlovian learning
• instrumental learning

Acknowledgements

The work presented in this manuscript was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under award number R01MH119511. DB received salary support from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australian (fellowship #1165010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following a convention set in part by reporting requirements by the National Institute of Mental Health, we asked participants to report their gender with response options of “male” or “female”. We acknowledge that this is a misuse of terms given that male/female are sex terms, not gender terms. We discuss participants’ self-report as “gender” and discuss “gender difference” in spite of the erroneous use of sex terms in our demographic form, because we reason that participants were likely to interpret this question as asking them to report their self-identified gender, not their biological sex (which we did not assess).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Health and Medical Research Council: [Grant Number 1165010]; National Institute of Mental Health: [Grant Number R01MH119511].