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7 ACTIVE APPROACH DOES NOT ADD TO THE EFFECTS OF IN VIVO EXPOSURE 181 It remains unclear whether the approach manipulation was effective. Participants in the Exposure + approach condition literally “pulled the strings”, but, contrary to what was expected, there was only a trend for perceived control to be higher in this group. Additionally, there were no differences on any measures in the decrease in spider fear between Exposure conditions, not even when looking at the time course effects during exposure trials. Even if the manipulation did work, then any potentially beneficial effects may have been overshadowed by ERP’s strong and robust effects (Gunter & Whittal, 2010; Shafran et al., 2009). Future studies could investigate the effect of a different approach manipulation during exposure, and compare this to a different exposure only condition, in which participants receive no visual information of approach. Additionally, the role of the decision to approach could be investigated, for example by testing whether effects on stimulus evaluation obtained with approach and avoidance motor behavior (e.g., as in Cacioppo et al., 1993; Förster, 2003; Kawakami et al., 2007; Wiers et al., 2010; Wiers et al., 2011) can also be obtained with the mere decision to approach or avoid. This could improve our understanding of the bidirectional link between behavior and cognition and affect, and the relevance of approach to ERP’s procedure. The APT effect did not change from pre- to posttest for any of the conditions, which indicates that the negative valence of the spider primes did not decrease because of exposure or the approach manipulation. This can be explained by the finding that negative stimulus evaluations are resistant to extinction (Engelhard et al., 2014). Negative evaluations remained existent on an affective priming task, even after learning that the evaluated stimulus was no longer followed by an unpleasant stimulus. This study has several limitations. Participants in the Exposure conditions may have guessed the hypothesis and acted accordingly. However, post-test enquiry about the goal of the experiment did not reveal an expectancy bias. Due to the nature of the procedure, it was impossible for the experimenters to be blind to the experimental condition. All instructions were formulated in detail in an experimental