Approaching Relief: Compensatory Ideals Relieve Threat-Induced Anxiety by Promoting Approach-Motivated States
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We propose that in anxious circumstances people are drawn toward idealistic meanings and purposes because ideals efficiently and reliably engage approach motivated states. We present evidence that approach motivation and anxiety are inversely related; that approach motivation and anxiety are positively and negatively associated with meaning in life, respectively; and that ideals are more reliable vehicles than concrete goals for sustaining meaning, approach motivation, and relief from anxiety. We suggest that various threats arouse anxiety because they generate goal conflict, review evidence for a reactive approach-motivation (RAM) interpretation of idealistic and worldview defense (Nash, McGregor, & Prentice, 2011), and integrate consistency, terror management, self-affirmation, and attachment-related theories of threat and compensatory defense from a RAM theory perspective. We conclude with a RAM account for why compensatory defenses tend to be idealistically conservative, group-based, and religious, and how they can be either antisocial or prosocial.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it