Avoidance Motivation
Effort can be organised around reaching something good or around not hitting something bad. The two produce different behaviour on an identical task, and the second is generally worse for performance.
What it is
Approach motivation orients attention towards a goal. Avoidance motivation orients it towards a hazard, which narrows the field and spends resources on monitoring rather than on the work.
The distinction is old and reasonably well established. What is not settled is which environmental cues reliably trigger which state, and that is where the colour literature enters.