Dissociating Avoidance Motivation from Negative Valence with Scenes of Suffering, Threat, and Interpersonal Harm

Many common conceptualizations of emotion assume that hedonic tone and motivations to approach or avoid are tightly coupled. Though this view has strong heuristic value, it can fail to differentiate classes of emotion that have similar valence but differing behavioral goals. Threats to personal safety may reliably elicit escape or avoidance. By contrast, cues of suffering in others can elicit competing or mixed motivational states, including prosocial approach. We characterized patterns of valence and motivational direction in response to images of suffering, threat, and interpersonal harm, as well as positive images with and without social content. Participants were 229 undergraduate students who reported their reactions using unipolar dimensions of felt positivity, negativity, approach, and avoidance. In comparison to threat (r = .77), we found that suffering (r = .31) elicited a weaker correlation between valence and motivational direction, and more pronounced coactivation of approach–avoidance states, despite similar levels of negative valence. Images of harm, which combined visual elements of suffering and threat, showed intermediate patterns of avoidance motivation. Across participants, higher trait empathy was associated with greater approach to suffering, while empathy and agreeableness were associated with more extreme valence responses across images. These findings offer novel evidence that motivational direction and valence are separable features of emotional experience and highlight the role of person–situation interactions in shaping the dimensional structure of affect.