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Affect of the unconscious: visually suppressed angry faces modulate our decisions
Jorge Almeida1, Petra E Pajtas, Bradford Z Mahon
1Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal. jorgecbalmeida@gmail.com
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience
|December 11, 2012
Summary
Nonconscious affective priming occurs even with invisible emotional faces. However, the type of masking technique (continuous flash suppression vs. backward masking) influences whether positive or negative emotions are processed.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Affective Science
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Emotional processing significantly influences cognitive functions and environmental perception.
- Investigating nonconscious affective processing under deep unawareness is crucial for understanding emotional modulation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if nonconscious affect processing occurs under deep unawareness using interocular suppression.
- To examine if nonconscious affect can elicit responses influencing environmental perception.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to render emotional faces (happy/angry) invisible before Chinese character judgment.
- Experiment 2: Backward Masking (BM) used as a less robust masking technique for invisible emotional faces.
- Assessed affective priming effects on likeability judgments despite visual suppression.
Main Results:
- Both CFS and BM achieved phenomenological suppression of visual primes.
- BM revealed nonconscious affective priming for both happy and angry invisible faces.
- CFS demonstrated nonconscious affective priming exclusively for angry invisible faces.
Conclusions:
- Affective processing differs based on the visual masking technique employed, even with equivalent suppression.
- Distinct neural pathways from the retina to the amygdala may underlie the observed dissociation in affective processing.
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