Two core motivational systems have been conceptualized as underlying emotion and behavior. The approach system drives the organism toward stimuli or events in the environment, and the avoidance system instead deters the organism away from these stimuli or events. This approach—avoidance dichotomy has been central to theories of emotion. Advances in neuroscience complementing well-designed behavioral experiments have begun to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying approach—avoidance motivation, suggesting that these two systems exist in parallel and are lateralized in the brain. This (...) review explores the notion of approach—avoidance and the cerebral lateralization of these motivational tendencies. (shrink)

Rutherford and Lindell (2011) review the theoretical and empirical research conceptualizing emotion and emotional processing within an approach-avoidance framework. This is accompanied by an extensive discussion of the cerebral lateralization of approach-avoidance. Berntson, Norman, and Cacioppo (2011) extend this discussion by presenting a bivariate evaluative model of emotion which adopts a valence-based (positive, negative) dictum. Here we discuss this latter model in the context of an approach-avoidance perspective.