Letting Go of the Negative, Holding on to the Positive? Within-Person Trajectories of Affective Habituation to Negative and Positive Stimuli

The <i>differential affective habituation</i> hypothesis argues that affective reactions decrease faster for positive than for negative information due to the greater evolutionary importance of threat over reward. However, limited evidence and low-powered studies hinder strong conclusions about this hypothesis from the extant literature, a gap the present research aimed to address. Because anxiety entails heightened threat anticipation, a second aim was to examine if higher anxiety intensifies this differential habituation pattern (i.e., <i>anxiety potentiation hypothesis</i>). Two experiments (<i>N</i>₁ = 104, <i>N</i>₂ = 211) provided within-subject exposure to International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images, manipulated stimulus valence, and assessed anxiety at baseline (Studies 1 and 2) or following an anxiety manipulation (Study 2). Results supported both hypotheses, highlighting the importance of examining positive habituation as a key mechanism in psychological functioning and suggesting that, despite its potential survival function, differential habituation may carry psychological costs.