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6 APPROACH BEHAVIOR AS INFORMATION 149 treatment for anxiety disorders (Hofmann, Asnaani, Vonk, Sawyer, & Fang, 2012). It aims to violate excessive threat expectancies by repeatedly exposing the patient to the feared, but innocuous, stimulus. Exposure is often established by asking the patient to approach the stimulus. Possibly, approach behavior decreases danger estimations and thereby adds to the beneficial effects of ERP. We therefore asked a large sample of students to rate the danger they perceived in scenarios with objective danger versus safety information, in which the protagonist did or did not display approach behavior. We hypothesized that highly anxious participants, compared to participants with low anxiety, would rate scenarios with approach behavior as safer than scenarios without approach behavior. On average, anxiety among students is relatively low (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995a; de Beurs, Van Dyck, Marquenie, Lange, & Blonk, 2001), whereas fear of spiders is quite common (34%, Seim & Spates, 2010). We therefore also investigated whether this hypothesis holds true for participants with high versus low spider fear. Arntz et al. (1995) and Engelhard et al. (2001; 2002) found emotional reasoning effects in anxious individuals for objectively dangerous and safe scenarios, but Gangemi et al. (2012) and van den Hout et al. (2014) found larger behavior as information effects in objectively safe versus dangerous scenarios. Therefore, we explored whether the hypothesized approach behavior as information effect was larger in scenarios with objective danger information or in scenarios with objective safety information. METHOD Participants and procedure The sample consisted of 325 students from Utrecht University and the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (226 women, M age = 21.44, SD = 2.32, range 17–31), who received course credit or could join a raffle for a gift certificate. All materials were presented to participants as an internet-based questionnaire using Limesurvey