Thriving and Surviving: Approach and Avoidance Motivation and Lateralization

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.