Social Anxiety Elicits an Approach Mere Exposure Effect for Angry Faces

Zajonc (2001) called the mere exposure effect (MEE) a "gateway into the subliminal"- specifically, the affective unconscious discrimination of stimuli. Zajonc proposed that the MEE occurs because repeated unconscious presentation of a stimulus automatically elicits approach toward it, and thus, positive affect. We present the first test of Zajonc's hypothesis of what we term an approach mere exposure effect. We did so by using an implicit measure that identifies preferred stimuli by assessing automatic approach reactions. A total of 42 highly socially anxious and 39 nonanxious control participants were administered masked exposures to either angry or neutral faces. Then they reacted to visible pictures of angry or neutral faces that were either previously presented (old) or new in one of two ways. They either (a) pulled a joystick toward themselves, which created the visual effect of approaching these stimuli (stimulus preference), or (b) pushed a joystick away from themselves, which created the effect of avoiding the stimuli. Mere exposure to angry faces caused socially anxious participants to pull-approach-old angry faces more quickly than new angry faces, that is, an approach MEE. Nonanxious participants nearly approached old neutral faces more quickly than new neutral faces. Mere exposure to angry faces also caused socially anxious participants to approach visible angry faces generally. and counterintuitively, to approach angry faces faster than they avoided them, whether they were old or new. These results suggest that the approach MEE generalized to have fear-reducing effects in socially anxious persons.