Approaching Relief: Compensatory Ideals Relieve Threat-Induced Anxiety by Promoting Approach-Motivated States
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".