Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in the appraisal of immoral behaviors and cognitions compared to non-religious individuals. This effect could occur due to adherence to prescriptive and inviolate deontic religious-moral rules and socioevolutionary factors, such as increased autonomic nervous system responsivity to indirect threat.The latter thesis has been used to suggest that immoral elicitors could be processed subliminally by religious individuals. In this manuscript we employed masking to test this hypothesis. We rated and pre-selected IAPS images for moral impropriety. We presented these images masked with and without negatively manipulating a pre-image moral label. We measured detection, moral appraisal and discrimination, and physiological responses. We found that religious individuals experienced higher responsivity to masked immoral images. Bayesian and hit-versus-miss response analyses revealed that the differences in appraisal and physiological responses were reported only for consciously perceived immoral images. Our analysis showed that when a negative moral label was presented, religious individuals experienced the interval following the label as more physiologically arousing and responded with lower specificity for moral discrimination. We propose that religiosity involves higher conscious perceptual and physiological responsivity for discerning moral impropriety but also higher susceptibility for the misperception of immorality.

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.

In this manuscript, we provide a discourse of issues and resolutions that we should be conscious of when doing research in the unconscious using backward masking of faces. First, we revisit subjects that are contributing for understanding the unconscious as a concept. These involve historical episodes and early episodes of controversial experimentation. Subsequently, we revisit and discuss topical concepts, such as the metrics and the statistical analyses applied for assessing perception during backward masking. We proceed to discussing novel and developing issues relating to masked visual processing and contemporary psychophysics. We empirically illustrate how these issues bias experimental research. We present and empirically illustrate resolutions for these issues, such as the application of signal detection theory metrics, Bayesian analysis and advances in the psychophysics of masked presentations using faces. We assess whether and the extent to which we are truly conscious of established and known, and novel and developing issues and resolutions. We make use of backward masking as a rally point to emphasize the importance of conscious scholarly and methodological awareness for undertaking and advancing research in the unconscious.

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Unbiased individual unconsciousness is a methodology that employs non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and Bayesian analyses to provide estimations for thresholds for subjective visual suppression. It can enable a researcher to define among brief durations (e.g., 8.33 or 16.67 or 25 ms), per participant and elicitor type, the threshold of presentation for which each participant is individually unconscious during masking. The outcomes of this method are then used in a subsequent experimental session that involves psychophysiological assessments and participant ratings to explore evidence for unconscious processing and emotional responsivity. Following collegial requests for a dedicated manuscript on the rationale and replication of this method, in this manuscript, we provide a thorough, comprehensive and reader-friendly tutorial-guide. We include empirical illustrations, open-source and ready-to-use methodological, mathematical and statistical coding scripts and step-by-step instructions for replicating this methodology. We discuss the potential contributions and the developing applications of individual unconsciousness in topical research.