Affective evaluation of self-produced action-effect episodes

Predictable action outcomes are central to goal-directed behavior. Prior research has shown that expected action effects confer performance advantages. Yet the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain debated. Across six preregistered online experiments (N = 702), we examined whether the expectancy of an action effect shapes the affective evaluation of corresponding action-effect episodes. In each study, participants responded to stimuli by clicking on buttons that produced effects with either high (stimulus-congruent) or low (stimulus-incongruent) expectancy. Induced affect was assessed using both implicit (affective priming) and explicit (valence ratings) measures. Overall, high-expectancy episodes elicited relatively more positive affect than low-expectancy episodes. For our implicit measure, this effect persisted unless correspondence among all task events (stimulus, response, and effect) was simultaneously reduced (Experiments 2 + 3). Furthermore, this outcome could not be attributed to mere visual mismatch between stimulus and effect (Experiment 4) and was observed even when stimulus-congruent effects were less likely to occur than stimulus-incongruent ones (Experiments 5 + 6). These findings suggest that expected action outcomes elicit positive affect, thus offering a parsimonious explanation for performance advantages previously attributed to more complex mechanisms like ideomotor accounts or response monitoring. More broadly, we propose that affective evaluation of action-effect episodes represents a fundamental mechanism governing behavior across multiple psychological domains, from basic action control to complex behavior in various settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).