Stefanie Kuschel

• In five studies we investigated how approach versus avoidance motivational cues affect thinking styles. Based on the cognitive tuning account we proposed that approach motivation facilitates abstract thinking and impedes concrete thinking, whereas the reverse is true for avoidance motivation. Individuals with an approach motivation go beyond the information given and focus on its central meaning, whereas individuals with an avoidance motivation focus on the externally provided information and attend to the specifics and contextual features of the information at hand. Two experiments using the perceptual interference paradigm that distinguishes between encoding of meaning and perceptual details demonstrated the influence of motivational cues on thinking styles: Participants engaging in arm flexion (approach motivation) recalled more perceptual interference than intact items, which is attributed to higher-level, interpretative encoding operations; participants engaging in arm extension (avoidance motivation) recalled more intact than perceptual interference items, which is attributed to elaborative encoding operations that go beyond the immediate interpretation and examine the distinctive stimulus characteristics. Two subsequent experiments demonstrated that encoding of perceptual interference versus intact items is bidirectionally linked to global versus local perception, suggesting that both courses of action involve processing structural relations among elements or, respectively, of perceptual details. The fifth experiment showed that participants with an approach motivation processed abstract why-aspects of action more fluently than concrete how-aspects of action, whereas participants with an avoidance motivation processed how-aspects more fluently than why-aspects. Altogether, the results suggest a functional compatibility between motivational orientations and thinking styles. Implications for research on person perception and text understanding are discussed.