Affect of the unconscious: Visually suppressed angry faces modulate our decisions

Abstract

Emotional and affective processing imposes itself over cognitive processes and modulates our perception of the surrounding environment. In two experiments, we addressed the issue of whether nonconscious processing of affect can take place even under deep states of unawareness, such as those induced by interocular suppression techniques, and can elicit an affective response that can influence our understanding of the surrounding environment. In Experiment 1, participants judged the likeability of an unfamiliar item—a Chinese character—that was preceded by a face expressing a particular emotion (either happy or angry). The face was rendered invisible through an interocular suppression technique (continuous flash suppression; CFS). In Experiment 2, backward masking (BM), a less robust masking technique, was used to render the facial expressions invisible. We found that despite equivalent phenomenological suppression of the visual primes under CFS and BM, different patterns of affective processing were obtained with the two masking techniques. Under BM, nonconscious affective priming was obtained for both happy and angry invisible facial expressions. However, under CFS, nonconscious affective priming was obtained only for angry facial expressions. We discuss an interpretation of this dissociation between affective processing and visual masking techniques in terms of distinct routes from the retina to the amygdala.

Grasping with the eyes: The role of elongation in visual recognition of manipulable objects

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are no data that suggest that elongated shapes are less suppressed than blob-like shapes by CFS (see discussion of Experiment 2 for additional consideration). In fact, we, and others, have shown that blob-like shapes (e.g., faces) can influence behavioral and neural responses under CFS (Almeida, Pajtas, Mahon, Nakayama, & Caramazza, 2013;Jiang and He, 2006;Pasley et al, 2004;Yang and Blake, 2012). Specifically, an emotional face (a blob-like shape) can interfere with likeability judgments over a neutral non-face item, whereas an elongated shape (a polygon) does not (Almeida et al,2013), suggesting that elongated and blob-like shapes do not differ in their general suppressibility or accessibility under CFS.…”

Emotional intelligence is associated with reduced insula responses to masked angry faces

“…The responsiveness of this core affective neurocircuitry to subtle affective stimuli presented below the level of normal conscious perception has been well studied [11,12] but not in the context of EI. In the present study, therefore, we used functional MRI to examine the association between EI scores and the responsiveness of this core affective neurocircuitry in healthy individuals during a subliminal angry face perception task.…”

Perceptual Organization and Consciousness

“…Images of emotional faces rendered invisible through masking, can influence behavioural performance (Yang et al 2007;Faivre et al 2012;Almeida et al 2013) and produce brain activation in neuroimaging experiments linked to emotional processing, like enhanced amygdala responses to fearful faces (Williams et al 2004;de Gelder et al 2005). This suggests that the neural mechanisms required for detecting emotional expressions operate even when we are not aware of the stimulus.…”