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CHAPTER 7 180 (Rinck & Becker, 2007). This implies a behavioral avoidance tendency for spider stimuli, and not a “fight” response. Second, the sense of approach may not have been different for the two exposure conditions: Merely observing the spider moving closer in the Exposure only condition may have induced a sense of approach. Note that, besides actual motor behavior, visual cues are also used as a source of information about one’s movement (Neumann & Strack, 2000), and the decrease of spatial distance toward the spider may have been interpreted as approach. Neumann and Strack (2000) showed that the mere impression of moving toward or away from a computer screen led to similar results as actual approach or avoidance behavior in a word categorization task. It seems that the effect of approach is not merely due to motor behavior (activation of the flexor muscle of the arm), but also to other cues of movement. Furthermore, perhaps similar cognitive processes played a role in both exposure conditions. The participants’ decision to pull the spider toward them or to have the experimenter pull the spider toward them may have been used as a source of information about the safety of the situation (Gangemi, Mancini, & van den Hout, 2012). Gangemi and colleagues showed that fearful individuals derive information about the safety of the situation from both objective danger information and, crucially, from their own avoidance and escape behavior: “I avoid, so there must be danger”. Additionally, in a recent experiment, participants who were allowed to use avoidance behavior during presentation of a safety cue (a stimulus that had never been paired with an unpleasant stimulus) subsequently had higher threat beliefs about that safety cue than participants who were not allowed to avoid that cue (Engelhard, van Uijen, van Seters, & Velu, 2014). Avoidance behavior thus generated threat beliefs about an objectively safe stimulus. The opposite may have occurred in this study: consenting to be approached by the spider may have decreased threat beliefs about the spider, “I decide to be approached, therefore the spider must not be that dangerous”. This would imply that the effect of approach may be due to the decision to decrease the distance to the spider.