Individual conscious and unconscious perception of emotion: Theory, methodology and applications

In this manuscript we review a seminal debate related to subliminality and concerning the relationship of consciousness, unconsciousness, and perception. We present the methodological implementations that contemporary psychology introduced to explore this relationship, such as the application of unbiased self-report metrics and Bayesian analyses for assessing detection and discrimination. We present evidence concerning an unaddressed issue, namely, that different participants and stimulus types require different thresholds for subliminal presentation. We proceed to a step-by-step experimental illustration of a method involving individual thresholds for the presentation of masked emotional faces. We show that individual thresholds provide Bayesian evidence for null responses to the presented faces. Conversely, we show in the same database that when applying established but biased non-individual criteria for subliminality physiological changes occur and relate - correctly, and most importantly incorrectly - to perception concerning the emotional type, and the valence and intensity of a presented masked emotional face.