Exploring Automatic Approach-Avoidance Tendencies: The Impact of Self-Relevant Social Feedback on Behavior

Previous studies have reported automatic approach-avoidance tendencies toward various stimuli such as words, face expressions, and images in the appetitive or aversive valence domain. This work investigates whether self-relevant evaluative feedback affects theses behavioral tendencies using a touchscreen-based approach and avoidance task, in which participants responded to two-colored fish icons either by swiping down or by push away. Evaluative feedback on participants' personality traits provided by the fish served as a task-irrelevant feature. A pronounced valence-congruence effect for positive feedback relative to negative feedback was observed. Interestingly, higher social desirability ratings of social feedback were associated with faster RTs for approach trials and slower RTs for avoidance trials. Personality traits were associated with approach tendencies and avoidance tendencies: higher BFNE scores predicted a slower approach for both positive and negative feedback compared to neutral feedback, whereas higher depression symptoms predicted faster avoidance of negative feedback. This study demonstrates automatic approach and avoidance tendencies toward self-relevant social feedback, indicating a behavioral predisposition that may be automatically triggered by social feedback. Additionally, this study lays the groundwork for the development of touchscreen-based approach-avoidance tasks for measuring individual differences in the sensitivity of social feedback information and the strength of behavioral predispositions.