Subjective Affective Experience under threat is shaped by environmental affordances

Threatening situations can evoke anger and fear. Besides hedonic motivations, anger and fear can also be modulated by instrumental factors, potentially environmental affordances. In this pre-registered study, we use a novel behavioral paradigm simulating threats via the presentation of horror movies. With this paradigm, we show that affordances in the form of items available in an agent’s environment, influence both behavior and emotional expression, in particular: 1. Whether an approach or avoidance choice is made, and 2. Levels of expressed anger and fear. Importantly, we demonstrate the causal relations between environmental affordances and the expression of anger and fear, such that more anger is expressed when resources favoring approach are available, and participants choose to fight. This offers pioneering evidence that the nature of environmental affordances shapes people’s behavioral and subjective threat responses. This also supports a broader theoretical framework where instrumental motives of emotional/behavioral regulation are expressed through their changes with affordances.