Predictable action outcomes are central to goal-directed behavior. Prior research has shown that expected action effects confer performance advantages. Yet the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain debated. Across six preregistered online experiments (N = 702), we examined whether the expectancy of an action effect shapes the affective evaluation of corresponding action-effect episodes. In each study, participants responded to stimuli by clicking on buttons that produced effects with either high (stimulus-congruent) or low (stimulus-incongruent) expectancy. Induced affect was assessed using both implicit (affective priming) and explicit (valence ratings) measures. Overall, high-expectancy episodes elicited relatively more positive affect than low-expectancy episodes. For our implicit measure, this effect persisted unless correspondence among all task events (stimulus, response and effect) was simultaneously reduced (Experiments 2+3). Furthermore, this outcome could not be attributed to mere visual mismatch between stimulus and effect (Experiment 4) and was observed even when expected effects were no more, or even less, likely to occur than unexpected ones (Experiments 5+6). These findings suggest that expected action outcomes elicit positive affect, thus offering a parsimonious explanation for performance advantages previously attributed to more complex mechanisms like ideomotor accounts or response monitoring.