Approach-motivated positive affect reduces breadth of attention: Registered replication report of Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008) ☆ Irena Domachowska ⁎ ,1 , Christina Heitmann 1 , Roland Deutsch, Thomas Goschke, Stefan Scherbaum, Annette Bolte Technische Universität Dresden, Germany abstract article info Article history: Received 28 February 2015 Revised 2 September 2015 Accepted 3 September 2015 Keywords: Attentional breadth Affect Motivational intensity Registered replication This is an independent replication of a study conducted by Gable and Harmon-Jones [Gable, P. A., & Harmon- Jones, E. (2008). Approach-Motivated Positive Affect Reduces Breadth of Attention. Psychological Science, 19(5), 476–482]. In this influential paper, the authors demonstrated positive affect high in approach motivation to re- duce the breadth of attention. The present replication study includes a direct replication of Experiment 2 from the original paper, comparing positive affect high in approach motivation with neutral affect, as well as a concep- tual replication, using different affective and control stimuli and comparing positive affect high in approach mo- tivation, positive affect low in approach motivation and neutral affect within one experiment. In both the direct and conceptual replication, we observed positive stimuli that were associated with high approach motivation to reduce attentional breadth in a Navon task when compared to control stimuli, thus replicating the effect reported by Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008). These results increase confidence in the generalizability of the original find- ings across cultures, as well as across different stimuli. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Emotions and moods not only influence the contents of cognitive processes (e.g., which stimuli we attend to), but they also modulate how information is processed (e.g., how narrow or wide the focus of at- tention is, for review see Bolte & Goschke, 2010; Goschke & Bolte, 2014). More specifically, there is evidence that positive affect is associated with a broadened focus of attention and a bias towards global or holistic aspects of stimuli, whereas negative affect is associated with a constrict- ed focus of attention and promotes the processing of local details (see Fredrickson, 2013; Friedman & Förster, 2010, for reviews). For in- stance, positive affect has been shown to increase cognitive flexibility in a range of tasks, as indicated by activation of remote associates (Bolte, Goschke, & Kuhl, 2003; Rowe, Hirsh, & Anderson, 2007; Topolinski & Deutsch, 2013), creative problem-solving and decision- making (Fredrickson, 2013; Isen, 2007; Isen, Dalgleish, & Power, 1999), improved execution of non-dominant responses in the face of competing automatic responses (Kuhl & Kazén, 1999), and greater glob- al than local visual processing (Gasper & Clore, 2002). Conversely, positive affect impaired performance in tasks requiring focused atten- tion and filtering out of distracting information (Bolte & Goschke, 2010; Goschke & Bolte, 2014; Zwosta, Hommel, Goschke, & Fischer, 2013). These findings have been generally interpreted as evidence for the idea that positive mood is associated with increased cognitive flex- ibility and a broadened focus of attention, which promotes the activa- tion of an extended network of thoughts and memories and the exploration of new ideas. However, in an impactful paper, Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008) ar- gued that broadening effects of positive mood on attention in earlier studies resulted from the low motivational intensity of the affective ma- nipulations in these studies, rather than the positive valence. According to their motivational dimensional model of affect (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010b), positive vs. negative valence and intensity of approach vs. avoidance motivation are two orthogonal dimensions characterizing emotions. More specifically, positive affect low in approach motivation- al intensity (in the following called positive-low) (e.g., joy) is assumed to signal that goal pursuit runs smoothly or that the goal was obtained and that there is no need for effortful control, thus promoting an explorative processing mode and a broadened focus of attention. In contrast, posi- tive affect high in approach motivational intensity (in the following called positive-high) (as elicited, for instance, by pictures of tasty food, which induce an appetitive motivational state related to the pursuit of the goal to attain food) is assumed to have the opposite effect and con- strict rather than expand the focus of attention (presumably to filter out irrelevant stimuli during goal pursuit). The motivational dimensional Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 67 (2016) 50–56 ☆ The current research was conducted according to a preregistered protocol available at: https://osf.io/c2bt8. ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of General Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Zellescher Weg 17, 01062 Dresden, Germany. E-mail address: irena.domachowska@tu-dresden.de (I. Domachowska). 1 These authors have contributed equally to this work. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.09.003 0022-1031/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp